Web analytics and IOT: connect online conversions to the physical world
By: Riccardo Cereser
Tags: IoT, Project Management, Scrum, Google Analytics, Ecommerce

Why building a physical online tracker?

Building a device like this has been a fun little personal project and that alone is a very good reason to do it. Although you can purchase mechanical counters that visualize web and social media metrics, building your own conversion tracker with an IOT it’s an extremely rewarding experience. Keep also in mind that the Shelly catalog of relays is very diverse and versatile and with a bit of creativity and maker skills you could come up with something truly original.

For instance, by using different Shelly relays, it’s possible make a led strip light up with different colors and intensity according to the web page seen by a user. Or maybe a fan could spin at a higher or lower intensity according to the number visitors on a website page. What about a bottle of champagne that can be opened automatically when the first 1000 leads are acquired?

And this lead to my second consideration: “physical” conversion trackers like the one I built at DFDS are a nice way to announce when a milestones is reached in real time, but not frequent and repetitive conversions. When DFDS Direct was made available only to a few beta testers, it was nice for the team to celebrate each booking that was made, but as soon as the frequency increased nobody was noticing the light.

I think that another reason to invest some time to build a tool of this type is to promote a development team internally. Powerpoint decks, roadmap posters and team photos define the identity of a team in a large organisation such as DFDS. However, it was priceless to see the surprised faces of the logistics managers visiting the DFDS tech hub, when they learnt that the light was blinking every-time a conversion was registered. It was nice to hear them asking if it was possible to build another conversion tracker for the sales team, so we can all feel more connected when we work in offices spread over multiple countries.

Resources

In the future, I might create a step by step guide but for now I can point you to a few resources that I based my project on:

Shelly One schematics configuration (a picture is worth more than 1000s words):

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/S9BTOirRQ-wsD00s3LUGmW-vNSuyLqBa4Cbmnd6q_pMDsvXGVlVyNzmbQzpsrnEvrdawLJllinnYk8oDgAWSqr_oTCFxoyiZnU2K9vvlEORwUAClI7HNVKmBRAB5PP8

Shelly app configuration (one of the many tutorial I found online if you really need a step by step guide):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4P2wj3o8r4

IFFT applets configurations:

https://www.shelly-support.eu/index.php?attachment/837-shelly-support-group-english-ver-pdf/

Follow this guide to setup different parameters for your lights(duration, dim level, led strip colors and intensity etc.):

https://www.facebook.com/groups/ShellyIoTCommunitySupport

And of course, the simply amazing Shelly support group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ShellyIoTCommunitySupport

Final considerations

It has been a fun experience building this little device. However it has been a great experience working with the DFDS Direct team, a team of dedicated FE and BE developers, designers, scrum masters, web analysts, business and logistics experts. At the end of May I left the project and DFDS for a similar position in a financial institution called Danske Bank. I am glad that, although the COVID-19 forced us to work for most of the time remotely, I was able to see the project going live and spend my last few days at DFDS with these lovely people. Go team!