How American Eagle Uses Web Analytics

American Eagle Outfitters

Background

According to their website: 

American Eagle Outfitters® (NYSE: AEO) is a leading global specialty retailer offering high-quality, on-trend clothing, accessories and personal care products at affordable prices under its American Eagle® and Aerie® brands. We are an inclusive, optimistic and empowering company that celebrates the individuality of our customers and associates. Our purpose is to show the world that there’s REAL power in the optimism of youth.

Mostly referred to as "American Eagle," this brand is based out of Pittsburgh, PA and was founded in 1977. American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. operates two distinct lifestyle brands, American Eagle Outfitters and Aerie, both focusing on the 15 — 25-year-old consumer (Job Opportunities at American Eagle Outfitters, n.d.). The brand targets young adults, however teenagers and older adults also frequent this store. American Eagle brand clothes include tops, bottoms, outerwear, jeans, accessories, and more. Aerie brand clothes include athletic wear, bras, bralettes, underwear, swimsuits, and lounge-type tops and bottoms. Also included under the overall AEO is Tailgate, which focuses on university and sports team wear.

Traffic Statistics

This traffic overview (ae.com Traffic Statistics, n.d.) shows that in October 2019, AE.com received 16.2 million visits, with an average visit duration of five minutes and eight seconds, 5.48 average pages per visit, and a bounce rate of 42.32%.

The traffic sources show that the largest amount of their traffic comes direct, followed by search, display, and social. This means that American Eagle has a lot of consumers who are reaching their brand directly, or through visits with no referring website. When a visitor follows a link from one website to another, the site of origin is considered the referrer; these sites can be search engines, social media, blogs, or other websites that have links to other websites (Kemmis, n.d.). Direct traffic categorizes visits that do not come from a referring URL. Very closely behind direct traffic is search traffic, meaning American Eagle probably has very good SEO practices, which I will get to in a second. 

The next thing that this image shows us is that following closely behind direct, is search traffic.

70% of American Eagle's Search Traffic is organic, and 30% of it is paid. This means they are likely using a mixture of SEO and paid search practices. 

Here is an analysis of American Eagle's display advertising. It shows that they utilize Criteo, Conversant Media, and Google Display Network.

Lastly, here is an analysis of American Eagle's social traffic. This shows much of their traffic is coming from Facebook, followed by YouTube and Pinterest.

Website Analysis

American Eagle's website (ae.com) is very well-established and aesthetically pleasing. It includes many links, photos, words, and all of the necessary SEO components to make it perform well. Here is a breakdown of the important SEO components:

• Words on page: 1,992
• Link words: 921
• Unliked words: 1,071
• Internal links on page: 333
• External links: 13
• Page size: 175,334
• Head tag elements: American Eagle Outfitters Men's and Women's Clothing, Shoes, and Accessories
• Meta description: Shop American Eagle Outfitters for men's and women's jeans, T's, shoes and more. All styles are available in additional sizes only at ae.com

When viewing their website, they use large graphics, images, and text, as well as numerous links. Not only is this good practice for SEO, it makes their website more user-friendly. They also offer a site map, where all of the possible site links are listed in one page. 

Data Collection

According to American Eagle's Privacy Notice (American Eagle Outfitters, n.d.):

"We may collect Personal Information when you interact with AEO or any of our brands, such as when you: 

• Purchase, return, reserve or try-on merchandise at one of our stores or through our Platforms; 

• Consent to receive our promotional email, SMS/text messages, job postings or other communications;

• Visit or register through our Platforms; 

• Participate in our contests, sweepstakes or promotions, or participate in one of our surveys or other customer research; 

• Contact or visit our Customer Service Department, or otherwise contact us or one of our service providers with a comment, question or complaint; or 

• Enroll in one or more of our loyalty or other reward programs."

...................................................................................................

" We may use third party ad network providers to help present ads on the Platforms, third-party mobile applications, or other sites, as well as other service providers to provide analytics services. These entities may use cookies, web beacons and other technologies to collect information about your use of our Platforms, such as your IP address, web browser, mobile network information, pages viewed, time spent on pages, links clicked and conversion information. This information may be used by us and others to, among other things, analyze and track data, determine the popularity of certain content, deliver advertising and content personalized to your interests and better understand your online or offline activity. For example, you may see advertisements for AEO on third party sites after you have visited AEO’s website. ........................... We may also work with other websites or platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat) to serve ads to you as part of a customized campaign, unless you notify us that you prefer not to have information about you used in this way. "

This is pretty much a confirmation: American Eagle uses analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to track user information, as well as advertisements on social media. Each of these tools provides information on what users are doing with their website, how they interact with it, and demographic information.

Conclusion

     American Eagle uses a mixture of approaches to web analytics. They indicate that they use analytics services, as well as paid advertising, and SEO. The data they collect is most likely used to target consumers through advertisements using various tools and services. However, I think they seriously lack with SEO. They have high direct traffic, which means that users are probably familiar with their brand enough to know to access it directly. However, they do not rank within the top ten pages of any of their keywords: "women's clothings" "men's clothing" "accessories" or "shoes." This is very surprising to me, and very concerning. They do very well at their own branding, as noted with their direct links and top traffic-driving key words. They could just do better at showing up against their competitors under more generic search terms. Here is their top 10 search word rankings, according to The Hoth's SEO Rankings:

References
ae.com Traffic Statistics. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.similarweb.com/website/ae.com.

American Eagle Outfitters Men's & Women's Clothing, Shoes & Accessories. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ae.com/us/en/content/help/privacy-notices.

Job Opportunities at American Eagle Outfitters. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://aeo.jobs/info/page1.

Kemmis, A. (n.d.). The Difference Between Direct and Organic Website Traffic Sources. Retrieved from https://www.smartbugmedia.com/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-direct-and-organic-search-traffic-sources.