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.

Our usage for the shopping holidays.


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.