Nosweaters: spinning yarn

When you’re in the business of connecting people with gifts that they want to give others, and you have the watchful eye of analytics on everything that they do, you tend to have the benefit of culling some interesting information from your users. While one should take this post in mostly jest, we thought it’d be fun to share our findings on how certain groups of people gave gifts.

The period of time in question is the leadup to the 2011 holidays (Nov. 25th - Dec. 24th). We’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, so hopefully it’s not too long overdue.

The Sample

We did a very healthy Stumbleupon run that yielded us a little over 144,000 unique visitors in the one-month period. While we don’t know for sure what the makeup of those users were, we do know that our healthiest demographic is women aged 15-30.

Who’s the Hardest to Shop For?

Apart from our home page, the page with the overwhelmingly highest amount of views was our boyfriend ideas page. About 8% of our total pageviews came from this page alone. This seems fairly congruent with our most popular item conversions, like the Black Skull Beer Bottle Opener Ring and The Zombie Survival Guide.

Rounding out the top 5, in order, are Mom, Dad, sister and girlfriend.

Window-shopping to Purchase Path

Because of its informal nature, we believe the typical user of our generic search pages is the “window shopper”, or someone who’s just looking for a few good ideas without the time investment of asking our community for help.

The items that pulled the most people out of this page and into Amazon were (in order):

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
2. Hopside Down Beer Glass
3. Gears of War 3
4. 2b Going Out Clutch
5. Grand Trunk Ultralight Hammock

And if you can piece together a pattern amongst these 5 items, we have a data analyst position with your name on it. Well, not really, because we don’t have money yet.

Biggest Head Scratcher

One item that yielded some of the top conversions was The Big-Ass Book of Crafts. We’re thinking this one is for Mom, since she appeared second amongst our hardest-to-shop-for, but who knows. Maybe it’s just our dads who don’t do bead art.

Truly Unique Ideas

For those who did ask our community for help, we had a mountain of contributions. Since these contributions and their conversions are essentially our DNA, we thought we ought highlight them.

1. DecoGlow Wine Country Collection 6-Piece Set 3-Inches Wine Cork Candles with Merlot Scent
2. Dads Are the Original Hipsters
3. Bucky Balls - The Amazing Magnetic Desktoy
4. Eviltron
5. Heat Sensitive Hypercolors Twilight Putty

Worst Window Shoppers

In our token “window shopping” areas (the generic search areas), we feature a scroll load page, where new content is populated automatically as the user scrolls down. Not exactly a novel feature, but we thought it’d be fun to track it as well.

Turns out, we had another metric: Which countries feature the “worst” window shoppers (that is, the people who need to see the most things). We’re able to cull this out as we passed the value of which page was being looked at each time the event triggered (on a new page). 

Egypt was the biggest “offender” (again, I want to emphasize that this is for entertainment purposes), having scrolled, on average about 5 pages. The rest of the top 5, in order are:

• Ireland — lower side of 4-5 pages scrolled
• United States — higher side of 3-4 pages
• Canada —  3-4 pages
• Australia — of 3-4 pages

The least picky with a decent sample size? Our neighbors to the south, Mexico, with 2 - 3 pages scrolled average. Thanks guys! We appreciate those with commitment to gifting ;)

The Wrap-up

We’ll leave this off with one final analytical finding from the site: Which American state is the most embracing of our new style of gift-finding. Why American states? Because our advertising efforts thus far have been directed at exclusively the United States.

So who are the most progressive gift-givers? In order to tease out population differences, we’re going to go off the almighty bounce-rate.

So, without further ado, the state that came in with a bounce rate of 37.74% was Oklahoma. To highlight how impressive this figure it is, it even beat out Arizona, our home state, where we personally enlisted many of our friends to help our launch go well. The rest of the top 5? Here ya go:

• Nevada
• Arkansas
• Texas

Why these states? We can’t be sure. We do know that the makeup of these top 5 are sparsely populated states where driving distances between residential and commercial areas are rather long, but we’ll have to do some surveying to shed some more light on this.

At any rate, thanks for your time and interest, and be sure to check out our site http://nosweaters.com to get unique, user-suggested gift ideas. We just recently revamped a lot of interactivity and would love some feedback.

Sometimes it can be hard to find a good question to answer on No Sweaters. There are tons of people looking for help finding gifts but where do you start? Previously, you could try the feed page to see the very latest questions. Or you could try the search page which gives you a bit more control over what questions you want to answer. But how can we make it dead simple to find questions you could answer? Well, we think we figured it out. Introducing the new User home page:

Now whenever you Log in to No Sweaters we automatically show you the questions we think you can answer. We pick these questions based upon past questions you have answered. We also show you all the latest stuff from various interests too. Call it a bit of inspiration.  To start answering a question, just click on it. And don’t forget, you can now add anything as a gift idea. We would love to know what you think of the new home page. If you get a chance drop us a line in the comments.

Nosweaters is all about finding the very best gifts. Previously, the very best gifts better have been available on Amazon.com or you were not going to be adding them. That has all changed. We recently rolled out some updates that allow you to add from anywhere on this wild place they call the Internets. That means if you find something cool on the ever popular Pinterest, you can add it to a question. Other great sites include Etsy, Thinkgeek, or Busted Tees. The list is really endless. Anywhere you find a great idea. So how do I add one you ask? Good question. Here, I’ll show you.

First, find the question you want to answer. Hey look, here is a great one about No Sweaters releasing some new features:

Ok, so now we have the question, perfect. Now, what do we get Dave… He is kind of a geek so maybe there is something good over on Thinkgeek? Hey this looks promising! Dave loves beer!

So first thing is to copy the link from the browser. No, it’s not hard. Just go to the link bar at the top and copy and paste:

Highlight the text. If you are on a mac press Command and C at the same time. If you are on a Windows machine press CTRL and C at the same time. And if you are on linux… wait, you are on Linux and you dont know how to copy and paste? Ok, back to task. Go back to the question you want to answer and click on the new “Add a Gift Idea” button (its down at the bottom):

Click the “Add a Gift Idea” button and you get a brand new dialog with 2 tabs at the top. Choose the “Add from URL” tab:

And paste that URL right into the text box. On a mac you press Command and V. On a PC you press CTRL and V. Then press the “Giftify” button (make sure you are on the “add from URL” tab).

Hey, check it out! It found the glass:

Now all we have to do is press the add button and Voila!

There it is, added to the question. See, I told you it was simple.

So thats it. Add anything from anywhere on the Internet. Now go forth and find the best gift ideas, where ever they are!

Here we go!