For this blog post I will be doing an analysis of the retailer Bed Bath & Beyond, in terms of the three criteria that measure the success of a website which are traffic, conversion, and revenue. This blog post is for my Digital Marketing Class taught by Professor Pepe, in which this analysis was taught during one of his classes.
I chose to analyze the website Bed Bath & Beyond because of its relatability to the content of my blog as well as to hopefully help others understand what measures the success of a website. To give you background on Bed Bath & Beyond, the retailer sells items varying from many different categories such as bedding, bath, kitchen supplies, furniture, home decor, etc. The site also allows customers to personalize their shopping experience by enabling them to create ‘ideaboards’ which allows them to write notes and save items to their board in order to envision what their space could look like. The site also has a tab for ideas and inspirations if you are looking for design and organization tips.
As mentioned before, the first measure of success when analyzing a website is traffic. Traffic can be broken down three ways; Direct, Search, and Referral. Direct Traffic is when a user types the URL, in this case https://www.bedbathandbeyond.com, into the search bar on websites such as Google. Bed Bath & Beyond experiences direct traffic in that they are a recognizable brand that is known for selling home decor products. Bed Bath & Beyond also experiences direct traffic because of their easy to remember URL, which simply states the name of the company. The next form of traffic is search, which can be broken down into paid and unpaid searches. Paid searches are when you search up a phrase, the company can choose for their website URL to be one of the first options you see. For an example, refer to the image below. In this image, you can see that I searched in Google the keyword “home decoration stores” which provided the URLs to various stores. Wherever you see the green word “Ad,” that means a company paid for their website to appear at the top, in this case Bed Bath & Beyond did not pay for their URL to appear at the top.
When the phrase ‘ad’ does not appear, it means that the company did not pay for their website to appear at the top, which is an example of unpaid search traffic. Even though Bed Bath & Beyond did not pay to have their URL appear, it is good that it appeared in the unpaid search area, which shows that keywords such as “home decor” are effective at driving traffic toward the Bed Bath & Beyond website. This also means that the brand is well-ranked on commonly searched products/keywords as well as uncommonly searched products/keywords.
The last kind of traffic is referral, which can be broken down into paid and unpaid. Paid referral is when an ad appears on another website, whereas unpaid referral could be an example of joining an email list or engaging in different social media platforms. Bed Bath & Beyond has various social media platforms which are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube, and it is effective that each icon is displayed on the website and is linked to the various social media pages.
The second measure is conversion which can involve getting consumers to purchase something off of your site, engagements, subscriptions, and account creation. Bed Bath & Beyond gives you an option to sign up for emails to keep up to date with the latest information and deals. The company uses the phrase “Ready to sign up for great savings?” to entice consumers to give out their email and the brand makes this appealing by showing how the opportunity to receive great savings is versatile in that you can access coupons via email, mail, or on your smartphone.
The last measure of success is revenue, which on Bed Bath & Beyond’s website can be obtained by adding products to the cart and purchasing them. Customers can check their cart at any time which is located in the top right corner of the website. In order to increase revenue, the brand refers customers to items that “you may like” and that are “just for you” to entice you to not only buy what you were intending, but purchase even more items that seem to pair well with what product(s) you have recently viewed or put in your cart. The purchase process is also easy for consumers to navigate and each product has detailed descriptions and customer reviews which makes consumers feel confident and at ease when making a purchase decision.
Lastly as mentioned above, keywords that I could use for my blog and so could Bed Bath & Beyond to increase the search ranking could be ‘home decor,’ ‘DIY,’ ‘home decoration,’ ‘organization tips’ and so on, but it is important that each keyword is related to what the site is about, which in this case is home decoration. To further refine the keywords, myself and Bed Bath & Beyond could use keywords that relate more specifically to different areas of the home such as the kitchen, bathroom, office, etc. and find out what consumers are searching the most and create further keywords based on those findings.
Home Is Where The Decor Is 