Showing posts with label web analytics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web analytics. Show all posts

Friday, August 12, 2011

Six Dimensions of Analysis for a Web Based Business

Most of us are familiar with web analytics thanks to great proponents of this trade, who have really made it large and got web analytics the due credit and recognition it deserves. However as web analysts most of us stop with click stream and do not look beyond that. Today I would like to talk about the other facets of analytics for a web based business which are equally important and would help us as marketer to solve the Rubik.

The First Dimension:


Is off course is what all of us are familiar with the “Click Stream Analysis”, which looks at visitor and customer behaviour on the website. We analyse the various referrers, frequency of visits, number of pages viewed, time spent on the website and more importantly how many converted into sales or leads or any other goals that we have set as success criterion. Another blog on web analytics KPIs which I have written in the past delves in this area.

The Second Plane:


Business/ Trade analysis: This analysis is surely being carried out perhaps in a separate department within your organisation or by business analysts/ consultants who keep the top management updated with regard to the health of the business. The Finance team also carries out this analysis and tracks growth in terms of sales, margin, cost and profit. In case of a business that is done on the web, it is important for the web analyst to understand the sales driven by the website, the profits made from different offering, parameters of growth and other such business KPIs.

To elaborate on the same for an ecommerce website we would look at the year on year/ week on week and other periods of comparison for sales, orders, average order value and growth on these parameters. We would look at factors contributing to growth, what percentage of it is from underlying customers and how much is from new acquisitions. Further also we need to look at operational metrics such as availability, speed and accuracy of delivery, customer complaints, etc. and macro economic factors like inflation, customer spending index, customer confidence measures, etc.

The Third Angle:


The most important element in the entire piece is the customers. How well do we know them? Let’s start with demographics. Who are these customers are they, young or old, male or female, where do they live, what is their educational, cultural, social background, how affluent are they, etc. We also need to look at data on how often customers buy from us, how much they spend and what products/ services they bought. This data is mostly available in our customer databases, which we use to target and market using email or even direct mail. We need to also research and understand what drives these customers, what their motivations to buy from us are and when they leave to our competitors why do they leave. This is usually data that we could get by qualitative research.

Fourth Estate:


Is all about competitors. What is our price and promotions position with regard to competition. We have at our disposal competition intelligence tools. These tools are at many levels, if you only need to know what is your visitor market share and market position, tools such as Alexa and Hitwise can help. However if you want to scrape your website or competition website to compare products, price and promotion information then there are service providers like eClerx, profitero and Netvide. These tools provide data to then build a basket of comparative products and the price index of our competitors with ours. This is very powerful as right price is increasingly becoming more important (especially in the online medium, where comparison is so easy) as the determinant of sale/ conversion.

Fifth Slant:



The marketing effectiveness study is our fifth component. This area of analytics is also a mature one as online advertising and targeting has been around and studied for a long time. There are tools like double click, Unica, etc that measure the return on investment of the marketing spend. They also are so advanced that they manage the end to end process of administer/ target the audience and measure the impact. The most popular online advertising channels are search engine marketing, email marketing, affiliate and online media (such as banners and links). Recent times we have more subtle marketing that has caught the interest of marketers is the social media marketing. You can read more on social media marketing in this blog - Social Media.

The Final Piece:



The final piece to the jigsaw puzzle is the new kid on the block – fraud analytics. Big ecommerce websites are easy targets for fraudsters. Analysis in this area involves identifying patterns of fraud attacks and to build rules to prevent them when they hit the website. This could help us to save not only losing revenue but more importantly reputation as well.

Puzzle Solved:



When we look and comprehend all this data impacting and contributing to the business individually as well as in a combination that is when we could draw more meaningful insight. This would give us a complete picture of how we could improve and optimise the business for better reach, profits, revenue and customer satisfaction.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Social Media is no "Passing Fad"

Social Media is here to stay. A year or so back it was widely speculated that “Social Media” (SM) is a fad and will soon evolve or vanish. However, no one can deny that SM is here to stay and perhaps even revolutionize the way we buy, sell, stay connected, interact and also evolve socially.

Just as the Internet revolutionized the world in the last decade of the 20th century, Social Media and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are in the process of doing the same. Just as with the advent of Internet a whole lot of ancillary industries evolved and are flourishing, the Social Media is nurturing quite a few industries already.

Any powerful invention will find its own use is so true, because social media is traversed all the boundaries that it was perceived to be built with. It is now a truly creative medium just like a canvas or cinema, which you can use to tell any story you want.

Social Media Marketing is of more interest to me as a marketer. Hence I will dwell more into SMM than SM in this blog. I would like to start with the most important phrase in any manager’s vocabulary – “What cannot be measured, cannot be managed”. And yes, SMM can be measured. There are various free as well as paid tools that are available with which you could manage your SM activities.

With the knowledge of we can track what is on SM and hence optimize our spend and increase our returns, let us now venture into how we could be associated and grow our business through SMM. The only prerequisite to be a good marketer in SM is you got to be imaginative and know your fundamentals well.

The Marketer has to follow the customer, if the customer is on the Moon we better be there and so be it for SM. The advantages that we have with SM are that the customer can double up as the marketer as well and when it comes from the horse’s mouth, the recommendation is worth much more. It is as close to as one can get as the product being recommended by a friend or a close associate/ family member and hence it is powerful and we cannot afford to ignore or let it grow organically. As marketers it is our responsibility to seed, grow and nurture these social relationships and what it can do for us and vice versa.

One Size Doesn’t fit all
SMM is by far the most creative as well as complex media that I have come across so far. But it is heartening to see so many creative marketers out there who are redefining many set principles and notions. SMM straddles from being a tactical tool to sell products and services and raise awareness to a tool that can facilitate research and understanding of the market place, target audience preference, etc to being a strategic tool that could facilitate or change the business.

The Different uses that SMM could be put to:

Crisis Management:


Alerts are set to highlight when there is a negative experience shared by consumers/ visitors in a forum or blog to tackle it by providing justification and the necessary corrective action we use it as a crisis management tool.

Selling Channel:
This aspect of SMM is widely and creatively used by many companies. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are the best resources in this area. Twitter was even used by the present American President Barack Obama in his campaign, need we say very successfully. Youtube is used by different technology manufacturers to promote product acceptance and demos. Facebook has innumerable success stories, please check Facebook marketing success stories

Brand Insight:
It can provide brand insight which is better than any market research. To explain in simple terms - Say for example you are Macdonald and when you find that your customers blogs or on discussion forums use keywords like tasty, delicious, wholesome and in contrast uses keywords like green, healthy snack, low calorie etc to talk about your competitor – Subway. It helps you macdonalds to form associations that your brand has in the minds of the customer.

Trend Insight:


Another area where SM can really benefit marketers is in getting a quick read on a trend. This is typically one of the hardest things to pick up using standard surveys. But social media gives you the opportunity to quickly scan millions of blog posts to see if there are themes emerging. For example look at this chart from Google trends where the red line indicates weight loss and the blue one MacDonald, see the occurrences when there is a spike in weight loss there is a drop in McDonalds. This would indicate an emerging trend to McDonalds, if the red line was steadily going up, it would be a cause of worry to McDonalds and they would react by introducing a calorie free range to their menu.

Consumer Insight:
Social media can help you to know your consumers better. (1) You could track all the topics/ keywords that are relevant to your brand and then evaluate the tempo of the conversations that are accompanied with these topics/ keywords. And then understand who are the contributors or influencers to these conversations online and then profile them (potential customers) and finally target them. Or (2) We identify a group of our customers/ potential customers and then track their behaviour online, which websites they frequent, how much they contribute/ influence their groups, what is their psychographic profile, interests, affiliations, etc.

Hence SMM is not just another channel that we could use to sell our products and services. But it could facilitate a lot more strategic marketing initiatives and helps to build a powerful brand for the new age.