Welcome back to my blog! When it comes to anything involving makeup, hair, and skin, Ulta has it all. When analyzing Ulta’s website I will be looking at three dimensions; traffic, conversion, and revenue maximization.
In terms of traffic, there are several subcategories to consider when analyzing Ulta’s website; direct traffic, paid and unpaid search traffic, and paid and unpaid referral traffic. Direct traffic occurs when consumers simply type the website URL into the search bar. Because Ulta is one of the most well-known beauty stores, Ulta most likely has a lot of traffic coming in directly from typing in the URL. Ulta has a short and simple domain name for consumers to remember making it easier to access the website directly from the URL search. When it comes to paid search traffic, these are the type of ads that appear on the SERP above the organic results. For Ulta, if you Google search “Ulta” the first link that appears is a paid ad for Ulta. When users engage in clicking on these ads the link becomes a form of paid search traffic. Unpaid search traffic is defined as any traffic that occurs from clicks on the organic SERP. When a consumer Google searches “makeup”, the first organic link to appear is for Ulta’s website. Because Ulta appears so high in the ranking for makeup, it can be assumed that much of Ulta’s online traffic comes from unpaid search traffic. Paid referral traffic comes from banner ads, text ads, and other ads of that nature, but Ulta has paid to do so. Whereas unpaid referral traffic is when another website or company refers to Ulta, but Utla does not pay for the promotion. It is likely that Ulta has a lot of unpaid referral traffic from other blogs and videos that pertain to beauty.
When it comes to conversion, this is the action that you want consumers to make after coming to your website. When Ulta brings traffic to their page they don’t want the consumers to click on and view the page, they want consumers to actually make a purchase. Ulta does a good job of increasing conversion rates by having an easy to navigate home page with a left-hand sidebar that brings customers to the categories and subcategories they desire. In addition to the main conversion goal of customer purchases, Ulta also focuses on a secondary conversion goal of having customers sign up for emails. The pink pop-up that can be found on the bottom of Ulta’s home page allows customers to sign up for emails that will eventually lead to the primary goal of customer purchases. The conversion rate of Ulta can be tracked by the number of purchases made and the number of email sign-ups. 
Lastly, when looking at Ulta’s revenue maximization they use several techniques to complement their already existing conversion rates. Just like any other website, Ulta wants to increase the value of each conversion using techniques such as:
- Customer reviews- Letting customers hear reviews on what others have to say about certain products will encourage potential customers to purchase.
- Recommended products – When customers are looking at individual products, the bottom portion of the page gives customers other products that are similar and other products they may like. Having these products easily accessible can encourage customers to add these products to their cart.
Overall, Ulta is a popular spot for beauty lovers to find much different hair, skin, and makeup products. My goal for this post was to analyze how Ulta’s website operates beyond all the amazing products they have to offer!
xoxo,
britt
p.s. check out Professor Pepe’s blog
beautywithbritt 