Customer data is key to developing a profitable business that has a sustained competitive advantage. Increasingly, business intelligence is being sourced from operational systems such as websites instead of from trusted third-party data providers. But are you taking full advantage of the information you gather every time a potential customer enters your website? This is a question that B2B enterprises are increasingly asking themselves as their markets become more aggressive.
Tracking website visits seems a simple piece of business intelligence to collect, but as Akin Arikan, who heads up Internet marketing and web analytics at Unica, provider of marketing management software, explains, many B2B enterprises have yet to fully exploit what web analytics offers. Successful B2B users of web analytics pay at least enough attention to the metrics in order to optimise their advertising spend for attracting visits or in order to optimise the site for converting visitors to leads, he says. However, fewer B2B companies have web analytics solutions in place that allow them to go down to the level of individual prospects visiting the site, such as contacts within organisations.
Helping to understand who your clients are and how they behave when they visit your site is at the foundation of what web analytics can offer businesses. Marcos Richardson, director of web analytics agency, WebtraffIQ says, The B2B company has a much deeper relationship with its customers. Customers can log on to a website and make use of any number of online applications. Tracking what they do and with what frequency generates a large amount of significant behavioural data, Amazon Web Analytics abilities with direct targeted messaging from user profiling makes most Web Analytics Vendor offerings look like a toy.’
hich makes the Amazon recommendation engine look like a toy. B2B sites have a better opportunity to respond dynamically to specific customers. Everybody can watch prospects click around and note how many page views a particular product receives. But B2B companies can create programmed responses for those who register online for products such as newsletters, for example.
How you approach web analytics on your site depends on what you want to achieve with the data you are gathering. There are three basic ways to gather customer data via web analytics.
1. Log files: At the most basic level you can use the log files that your ISP can provide as part of your hosting contract. The problem with this brute force approach is that the data that each log file contains needs to be analysed to provide meaningful information. When you are choosing an analysis software to use with your log files, ask yourself which pieces of information are most important.
Log files can contain information such as: which page was viewed first, where the visitor has come from, their IP address, the browser they are using and which platform your visitors are using. Also, bear in mind when choosing your analytical software package that log files are not all the same. For example, the servers from Netscape and Microsoft have different log file formats.
2. Page tags: these tags are pieces of code that are embedded into each page you want to track. When the page is viewed, a log is created. This is how Google’s analytics work. You can gather a wide range of data from the page being viewed and the referring page, or where a visitor has come from. Page tags can also be very useful to track page events. So for example, they can show the site’s owners how many people are abandoning their trolleys before checkout, or how much of a page is being scrolled. Log files and page tags can also be combined into hybrid page tags. Together they can give an even more accurate picture of visitor behaviour.
3. Cookies: These are small pieces of code stored on a visitor’s computer. You will have already experienced cookies as they enable you to automatically log onto your favourite online stores and buy without entering all your details and credit card numbers each time you visit.
Cookies can also be used to track visitor behaviour. One great advantage is that they can accurately track unique visitors, which you can compare to repeat visitors. However, with adware and spyware still a problem for many users, cookies can easily be removed with adware cleaning software, so basing your entire web analytics structure on cookies should be avoided.
Each of these methods have pros and cons, so it’s important to define what your goals are for the data you are collecting. Without this information the data will be meaningless. Think about what kind of reporting is most useful to your business and match these needs to the package you buy.
Linda McDougall, general manager of web analytics company, Nedstat UK, says, The key for any organisation is to consider what they are going to do with the wealth of information that a web analytics solution provides. Do they have the resources to act on the information? Is the solution easy to use for people that may not have experience with online metrics? Does their chosen solution provide support and training to ensure that they get ROI?
The cost of web analytical systems varies depending on how deep you want to drill into the data you are collecting. Most vendors charge based on page impressions over a year. Unica’s Akin Arikan explains, In the best case, web analytics can double your revenues simply by improving your visitors-to-leads conversion rate on the website from 0.5 per cent to one per cent. One Unica customer achieved a 401 per cent improvement in its site conversion rates for a particular call-to-action.
Free tools like Google’s can seem a great way of leveraging your site visits into sales, but Michael Stebbins, VP of marketing at web analytics company ClickTracks, warns about partnering with free tool vendors. For most commercial products, costs are proportionate to site volume, complexity of implementation and ongoing professional services. Nothing is really free, he says. Advertising service providers (like Google) provide ‘free’ web analytics in exchange for ownership and use of your customer data. Web analytics vendors, such as ClickTracks, sell licenses ranging from £150 to several thousand pounds, as well as monthly hosted services ranging from £9 to several hundred pounds.
Web analytics are akin to auditing a shop window or store layout in the tactile world. If you know which areas of your store are attracting the most paying customers, you can develop those sites and increase your turnover and profit. You can perform a similar feat online with web analytics to enable you to track how the pages on your website are being used by visitors. A simple relocation of a promotional banner can produce significant upswings in interest that directly connect to more lucrative business.
Sean Burton, lead technical consultant at web analytic company, Foviance, says, The market is maturing and with that is increased awareness of the possibilities and value of analytics tied to your KPIs. As clients become more familiar using the web as a business channel they are beginning to have a much better understanding of what they want to measure. As we provide more targeted data, the value of analytics becomes self-evident. There is also a definite trend towards our clients being marketing departments rather than from IT. Marketing departments tend to have a much clearer understanding of what they should be measuring, as the information will feed directly into their strategies.
Damian Reynolds, head of digital media at B2B agency, Cicero, cautions about tracking your visitors too closely. The data can be incorporated into CRM systems to give a new dimension to the information that can be sourced. This can provide a very accessible insight into the results of a campaign’s performance and also the behaviour of that particular prospect when visiting your site, he says. However, there is a danger of stalking the prospect too closely and it can be disconcerting to the user to know that every move is being watched.
There is increased awareness in the B2B market about the power of the web as an acquisition and retention channel, adds Nedstat’s Linda McDougall. The use of forums, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies is not only growing in the B2C world, but also in B2B. There is a wealth of data available and web analytics has risen higher on the agenda for B2B marketers. However, many B2B companies are not sure how to use the data to improve their online business. Businesses are struggling to find the resource and knowledge inhouse to act on the information available. For businesses to make web analytics a success, it is vital they are clear about their objectives. Selecting a full-service web analytics solution that is fully supported and provides training will lead to ROI.
Google recently launched its website optimiser service that aims to help AdWords (its programme for creating ads) users to optimise their website’s landing page. Microsoft also recently acquired DeepMatrix and is intending to incorporate it into its own AdCenter. Web analytics is fast becoming a key driver for all businesses no matter what sector they trade in.
The future of web analytics is that there will be more integration with CRM systems to provide businesses with data that they need to convert visits into sales. What is clear is that your website will increasingly become a place of events and processes and not simply page views and clicks. Tracking these events and processes is data that all B2B enterprises should be actively capturing.
