Is Anything on Your Fashion Store Counting? Find Out Tonight.

For two years I had analytics running on my own website and never opened it once, so I’m in no position to lecture anybody in fashion.

When I finally did, my most-read page turned out to be a post I’d forgotten writing, about hosting, and the piece I was proudest of had been read eleven times. Four of those were me, checking that it looked right on a phone.

I am going to ask you to run a check tonight, though, because your trade does this worse than mine does.

44.0% of the fashion sites I audited run analytics, where 58% of small businesses do.

Only hair salons come in lower on that check. Accountants are the row directly above, and they came last of all 47 industries once every check got added together, which is not the company a clothing brand should feel relaxed about keeping.

What the thing actually is

You have a camera over the till.

Nobody sits and watches it, it has never sold a jacket, and you would never take it down, because it’s the one object in the shop that can settle an argument about last Saturday.

Analytics is that camera, pointed at your website instead of your floor. It knows which dress held attention on Tuesday and which one every visitor scrolled straight past, and it keeps that recording whether or not one person in your business ever asks to see it.

So is yours switched on? Most owners I ask are fairly sure it is, and plenty of the ones who are sure turn out to be wrong.

Right. Get your phone. The whole check takes five minutes and you can do it from the couch.

Step one: send one text

Message whoever built the site and ask two things. Is analytics installed, and can I have the login?

Then pay attention to how long the answer takes. How long do you reckon yours will be?

A reply inside the hour means someone has thought about this before you asked. A week of silence is also an answer, and it’s the one I see most often when a new client forwards me the thread.

Step two: open your own admin

While you’re waiting, go and look for yourself.

On the Shopify stores I look after, the setting sits in the preferences screen under Online Store, and there is either a Google property connected there or an empty box where one should be. Every other platform I work in hides it somewhere similar, usually under settings, usually one level deeper than it needs to be.

Is there anything in that box on your store? Have a look before you read the next line, because the answer is more interesting when you find it yourself.

The empty box is the most common thing I find. It isn’t a scandal and nobody was lazy about it.

It’s a job that never got assigned to a person, on a website where everything else got handed to the software and quietly handled.

Step three: make yourself appear

Say you get in. Open the realtime screen, the one showing who is on the site at this moment.

Now turn the wifi off on your phone so you arrive looking like a stranger, and open your own homepage.

Give it a minute. If nothing moves on that screen while you’re standing on your own website, the tracking is installed and not working, which I find more often than the empty box and which nobody would ever notice on their own.

Have you ever watched yourself land on your own site? It’s a stranger feeling than it sounds, and it changes how you look at the homepage afterwards.

Step four: ask it the one question that matters

Now the hard part, and plenty of stores fail it with everything switched on and working.

Ask what happened last month when a visitor hit send on your contact form, or tapped through to the size guide, or opened the stockists page.

When did anyone last tell you how many people asked your website for something?

If all it can hand back is that people arrived and left again, you own a tally of strangers and nothing about what any of them wanted.

A visit is a person walking through the door. An event is the fishbowl of business cards beside the till, and the fishbowl is the only one of the two you would ever bother reading.

Wiring that up is an hour or two of work for whoever looks after your site, and it belongs on the same short list as the backups, the updates and the rest of the jobs someone should be doing every month. Ask for the form and the phone tap first, then the size guide, and ignore everything else until those three have run for a month.

The two objections I get

The first is that it feels creepy, and I understand the instinct, though it’s aimed at the wrong thing. Creepy compared with what, though?

You aren’t reading anyone’s mind or collecting names. You’re finding out that the boots page was busy on Thursday and dead on Friday, which is the sort of thing you’d have known in a heartbeat if those women had walked past your window instead.

The second is that nobody has time to read reports. Neither do I, so don’t read reports.

Open it at the end of the month, look at which pages people opened and how many of them asked you for something, and close it again. Ten minutes, once, with a coffee.

I’d rather you didn’t take my word for the state of your trade either, which is why all of it sits on one page: picking fashion in the explorer, with the city list left alone, prints every check I run with the number of sites behind it. The analytics line is the one I’d read first, and 2,064 audited stores sit behind the fashion row.

Why your trade lands where it does

I don’t think this is laziness, and I’ve stopped believing it’s about money.

Clothing shops get handed a website that arrives working. The checkout works, the pages have their code in order, the lock is on the door, and none of that required an owner to learn anything or approve anything.

Fashion never fails that lock check, and not one owner in the trade had to lift a finger to earn it.

So the habit of deciding never forms. Analytics is the first job on the entire list that waits for someone in the building to actually want it, and it can sit there waiting for years without a single thing going wrong.

Chiropractors land in the same shape for the same reason, near the top of my list on one check and near the bottom on another, depending on whether anybody in the building took the dull jobs.

Meanwhile you make decisions about the rack every single week. You move the mannequin, you pull the color that isn’t shifting, you put the good coat where the light hits it, and you do that on evidence you gathered by standing there.

Your website gets none of that attention, and it’s the shop floor that stays open the longest hours. When did it last get the thought you give the front window on a Monday morning?

Every store I build launches with the counting already running and the form wired into it, and it’s the least interesting thing I do, and the thing owners thank me for first.

Tonight

Do the five minutes. Text, admin screen, realtime, then the one hard question.

If this were my shop, I’d spend an hour on Sunday getting the login, watching my own visit turn up on that screen, and telling the thing to record the form. Then I’d leave it alone until the end of the month.