Partner Article

The dynamics of online analytics

Bdaily is looking at Online Marketing in this, our latest focus week. Here, Conrad Bennett, vice president of Technical Services, EMEA at Webtrends, describes how online analytics can enhance a business’ performance.

More and more businesses are trying to keep up with consumer spending habits and have recognised the importance of understanding how their customers are behaving on digital channels.

However, the sheer volume of data makes it an overwhelming task for businesses to even contemplate where to start in using this data. A report from IDC suggests that the digital universe will reach 40 zettabytes by 2020, and revealed that each person is creating an average of 1.8 million gigabytes of information annually.

Driven by competitive pressures and the increasing demands of consumers for more personalised experiences, it has never been more important to understand a consumer’s behaviour across all available digital channels and have the ability to use that intelligence to take action. Having a welldefined measurement strategy enables an organisation to view, track and measure visitor behaviour and capture insight that can be used to create highly relevant and personalised experiences online.

Internal teams can base their decisions and direction on actual customer behaviour rather than guesswork, which in turn, can improve customer satisfaction.

East Coast is a brand that has done just this. Booking travel online is rapidly increasing and businesses in this industry need to have websites that are easy to use and provide informative and relevant experiences to the consumer. From working with Webtrends, East Coast has been able to use online analytics to extract visitor data that could be used to make performance enhancing changes to its websites that improve the experience for its customers, as well as identify additional sales opportunities.

This approach to measuring online behaviour and marketing successes can also be applied to other platforms, such as mobile apps. An example of this is the work Standard Life is currently undertaking to identify the characteristics and behaviours of specific groups of visitors across its mobile app.

By exploring the larger visitor population and then narrowing it down with events and attributes to identify a specific segment of customers, it enables internal teams to tailor certain offerings and campaigns to different customers.

Analytics is enabling organisations to better understand their customers’ activities and adapt to create optimum experiences online. Quickly responding to the data available to a business has never been more important, with the availability of real-time data analytics. The ways in which organisations track and measure their customer behaviour is also evolving the way in which digital marketing is delivered to them. To be relevant every time, everywhere requires a deep understanding of your customers’ behaviour across all digital channels.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Webtrends .