4. Effectively Reroute customers from competitors: AMEX Customer traffic data

4. Using a similar web market intelligence platform (similarweb.com) please discuss the customer traffic data and provide recommendations/suggestions for further improvement with clear justification (week 4 topic).

It is important for a business to aim to improve their decision-making predicated upon a complete understanding of its customers, this will allow for a better customer experience (Laudon and Laudon, 2019 p.260) and can be done by measuring the success of your online presence through analysing the customer traffic data.

According to similarweb.com American Express’s website attracted an average of 70 million monthly visitors between August and October 2021 which is almost 50% less than visitors received by their top 3 competitors. Being that these competitors do have a customer base that is 10 times higher than American Express it can be said that the website does receive a good amount of traffic.

It can also be said that the company has an engaging landing page and website overall as customers don’t leave the website immediately but follow through to further pages with an average of 6 page views per visit.

The website has a low bounce rate of 24.85% meaning that 24.85% of visitors leave the website after viewing just one page which sits well within the average in comparison to their competitors. Furthermore the average duration of time spent on the site is 5 minutes and 4 seconds, this allows customers a good amount of time to learn about the brand, browse their site and ultimately convert.

In terms of geographic location the website receives the most traffic from the US and UK followed by Canada. Over the months of August to October there has been a 20% increase in visitation from India which has one of the fastest growing economies. To target and convert visitors from this country it is recommended that American Express localises their website’s user experience and caters their reward and benefits to more suitable programs for the Indian market .

American Express uses various digital marketing channels to bring traffic to their website including Social media, Email marketing, search engines and affiliate marketing. But the digital marketing channel that drives the most traffic to American express.com is their direct website at 72.80%, referring to visitors who directly visited the website without any other link. According to Google analytics 20% is a healthy amount of direct traffic. AMEX’s high percentage of direct traffic shows that people remember and are interested in the company. Furthermore it also reflects their high brand recognition well.

Overall it can be said that American Express has good customer traffic with steady numbers of website visitations and engaged visitors.

However, in order for the company to increase their customer base through the conversion of their high customer traffic it is suggested that they diversify their long co-brand card offers. Currently the company has co-brand cards with British Airways, Marriott, Vitality and Amazon prime for Business. Meaning that personal co-cards only cater towards travel and health. Amazon Prime currently has 15 million UK users as this number continues to increase, offering Amazon prime as a personal card rather than only as a business card could cause an increase in customers.

Furthermore, a reason often given by people for not applying for an American Express card is the belief that the card isn’t accepted at many places. Although not as widely accepted as VISA and MasterCard, this issue has become much less common in recent years as AmEx is accepted at most medium and large size businesses. It also has an increased acceptance in small stores for which the company has introduced the Shop Small incentive. The Shop Small offer is an effort to advertise and increase acceptance rate in smaller stores through incentivising customers to shop at small businesses, in return customers get £5 back when they spend £15+. It is suggested for AmEx to advertise their wide card acceptance range in order to reduce the common belief of the card not being accepted at many stores.

(Similarweb,2021)