Tarte Cosmetics: A Case Study of its Web Analytics and SEO Strategy

 

What is SEO?

According to Search Engine Land, an educational platform about search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing, SEO is “the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines.” Better visibility is important because it leads to an increase of traffic, more potential leads, and promising future conversions.

Search engines rank websites by sending out bots to crawl a website, looking at the readability, the value of backlinks, the keywords used and the relevance of the overall content to the keywords. Then, the bots index the page based on their findings. In other words, bots analyze the user experience of a website. Is it smooth? Does it make sense? Is it topically relevant to what the webpage is ranking for?

SEO is completely organic. This means that once companies implement SEO strategies across their websites, including on-page SEO keywording, they will rank based on how well their strategies work. They can’t pay to rank higher or lower. However, many keywords will transfer to paid ads just as well as organic search.

Within the conversation of SEO, it’s necessary to mention that there are toxic practices that can reduce a website’s ranking, called black hat SEO. One example of this is creating multiple blogs to link back to a main blog, creating page authority where there truly isn’t any (Search Engine Land, n.d.).

What Web Analytics Are Worth Tracking for Ecommerce?

Tracking the right web analytics is integral to a website’s success or failure, but which analytics a company tracks depends on the purpose and the marketing goals of the company. Some of the more important KPIs to track for ecommerce are the following:

- Website traffic and mobile site traffic

- New visitors vs. returning visitors

- Time on site

- Page views per visit

- Bounce rate

- Traffic source

- Day part monitoring

- Subscribers

- Chat session

- Average position

- Click through rates

These metrics can be tracked in the free version of Google Analytics.

The following is a more in-depth look at what the first three KPIs do and why they are helpful.

Website Traffic & Mobile Site Traffic.

These two metrics show how many visitors land on the site, where they come from, and what kind of device they’re using. This lets marketers track when and why traffic increases and decreases, comparing it to promotions occurring at the same time or recent marketing campaigns.

New Visitors Vs. Returning Visitors.

These metrics have a downstream relationship with other worthwhile metrics, including Customer Lifetime Value and Transaction Value. They help marketing departments adapt and shift marketing efforts to target new visitors and maintain relationships with returning visitors. It’s well-known that the more returning visitors, the higher the revenue.

Time on Site.

Also called Average Session Duration, Time on Site shows whether the user experience (UX) makes sense and the content is relevant to what the user was looking for. A low duration reveals problems within the UX, while a high duration promises a good UX. Some ways to combat a low duration is video implementation across the site, related content articles, relevant product suggestions, and chatbots to engage visitors (Booth, 2021).

How Tarte Cosmetics Implements Web Analytics & SEO

Tarte Cosmetics is a high-performance, natural, clean beauty brand. It uses clinically proven ingredients extracted from fruits and plants that are vegan-friendly and consumer-tested. All products are free of parabens, mineral oil, phthalates, triclosan, sodium laurly sulfate, and gluten. Instead, the company uses ingredients like Amazonian clay, maracuja, prickly pear, snow mushrooms, and algae. Tarte Cosmetics was founded by Maureen Kelly, current CEO, in 1999 to fill a hole in the beauty industry, joining the early trend of clean beauty. In 2017, the company launched Heart to Tarte, a non-profit dedicated to animal welfare, women’s empowerment, ending cyberbullying, and more (Tarte Cosmetics, n.d.).

What Analytics Tools Does Tarte Use

Tarte Cosmetics uses TurnTo, Pixlee, and Oracle for data collection and aggregation. Each platform adds another angle to its data, allowing the company to better analyze its audience and engage with them.

TurnTo

TurnTo is a software that helps with ratings and reviews. Kellen Fitzgerald, Director of Marketing, Digital & Client Experience at Tarte, said, “Reporting and analytics was really important to us. Having access to a dashboard that was easily manipulated and pull data at the granular level—but also at the macro level over time was a key factor in our decision on who to choose. TurnTo was definitely ahead of the curve in terms of technology and offerings out of everyone we spoke with” (Chadha, 2019). The TurnTo software let customers filter products based on reviews. In other words, customers could search through products based on reviews that said they were good for oily skin or combination skin. After the implementation of this software, the reviews skyrocketed from less than 50,000 in four months to 200,000 in eight months. TurnTo gave Tarte Cosmetics perspective on what their customers were saying, analyzing and aggregating the data in one place, while allowing current customers to interact with the products through the reviews (Chadha, 2019).

Pixlee

Pixlee collects Customer-Generated Content. In other words, it categorizes and organizes quality reviews, recommendations, and influencer content. The Pixlee focuses on creating a solid foundation for Tarte’s reputation and delivers a high-level customer engagement experience. Tarte uses Pixlee for its Customer-Generated Content strategy that informs its Guided Selling strategy (Chadha, 2019).

Oracle

Oracle is a cloud-based software that supports tiered membership, rewards customers for engagement, captures and analyzes user behavior and preference, and implements a loyalty program. It uses an omnichannel strategy, tracking sales and interactions in retail stores, social media, online purchases, predictive analytics, and through AI technology. Fitzgerald said, “With the data we’ve captured from Oracle CrowdTwist, we’ve proven that the loyalty client is immensely valuable to our brand, making up about 20%.” Since the loyalty program was founded, Tarte’s revenue increased by 98% and AOV increased by 25% (Oracle, n.d.).

How Does Tarte Implement Its Analytical Findings

One of the ways that Tarte implements its analytical findings is in a Guided Selling strategy. The Guided Selling approach solicits data from customers to provide a tailored experience through customized plans and product offerings. This approach walks the customer through the browsing phase, ensuring they find products that suit their unique needs (Chadha, 2019).

The Guided Selling strategy has lead to:

- 1.6 million total visits

- 3:55 average visit duration

- 50.7% bounce rate

- 4.11 pages per visit

These metrics all directly relate to how people are interacting with Tarte’s content and how they feel about the UX. While there’s always room for improvement, these metrics are generally promising. A quick comparison of January metrics (above) to the October total visits metric, 3.0 million, shows that there was an unusual increase in website traffic in the fall (SimilarWeb, n.d.). This would be beneficial to follow up on and analyze. Was there a promotion or sale at the time? Was a new product released? Did an ad perform well? Was the On-Page SEO strategy changed at all?

Tarte also ranks for over 800 keywords, including tarte, tarte cosmetics, tarte shape tape, tarte concealer, and tarte us sale. However, direct traffic only makes up 41.59% of Tarte’s total traffic. This is above average, which is generally cited as being around 30%. At the same time, 64.19% traffic is from organic search. This shows how well Tarte’s SEO strategy is working (SimilarWeb, n.d.).

Suggestions for Tarte’s Web Analytics and SEO Strategies

In general, Tarte’s website performs well, and it doesn’t need to put too much effort into its ranking, since it’s such a well-known brand. However, it could still improve in some areas. Recently, Tarte’s overall website ranking went down by over 7%. This could be improved through some more On-Page SEO strategies that promote products, using clean beauty buzzwords (SimilarWeb, n.d.). As a larger company, Tarte would be able to rank for these keywords easier than a smaller business could. Along a similar line, Tarte should branch out in its keyword strategy, while investing in returning visitors to ensure maximum revenue.

References

Search Engine Land. (n.d.) What is SEO/Search Engine Optimization? Retrieved from https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo.

Booth, Kathleen. (2021). 11 important web analytics: Ecommerce and KPIs. Clean.io. Retrieved from https://www.clean.io/blog/11-important-web-analytics-ecommerce-and-kpis.

Tarte Cosmetics. (n.d.) About us. Retrieved from https://tartecosmetics.com/shop/explore/about-tarte/.

Chadha, Rahul. (2019). How TurnTo + Pixlee helped Tarte Cosmetics supercharge its guided selling strategy. TurnTo. Retrieved from https://www.turntonetworks.com/blog/how-turnto-pixlee-helped-tarte-cosmetics-supercharge-its-guided-selling-strategy/.

Oracle. (n.d.). Tarte: Tarte designs a loyalty program that customers love. Retrieved from https://www.oracle.com/customers/tarte/.

SimilarWeb. (n.d.). tartecosmetics.com. Retrieved from https://www.similarweb.com/website/tartecosmetics.com/#social-media.