At this level you will also see analytics used to segment visitors. Learning about them enables you to run analytics according to these slices. So, for example, it can begin to reveal if older women are buying my product more than younger men. Or what is your customers’ geographic location, gender, age, income and so on.
With this information you can begin to really understand your market. If you run an ad campaign in the eastern states of Australia, for example, you can measure its impact at your website. According to Gassman, certainly less than a third but probably closer to 20 percent of businesses will operate in this way.
The fourth level and still pretty much the frontier of web analytics, according to Gassman, will see businesses begin to consider integrating analytics across channels. A recent Forrester report shows that: “Firms improve their ROI acumen when they follow customers who visit the website, don’t buy immediately, and then consummate their transaction through other channels.”
It explains that while businesses are most comfortable producing basic reports many are exploring some of these more complex uses. This includes sharing data with other channels—importing information from other sources (such as point of sale), and pooling data to build rich, multi-source customer profiles.
Forrester states that while integrated customer profiles are really only on the horizon for a lot of firms, 60 percent of those surveyed engage occasionally in at least three (of eight) core examples of what it views as this kind of “customer analytics” level activities.
Over the horizon Gartner’s Gassman sees the top level of web analytics simply as part of corporate performance management. This is where the web channel merely shows up in an executive-level report as simply another available channel. The Web becomes integrated with all the other business intelligence systems so you can do activity-based costing, really understanding if it is easier to pursue customers through the Web or another way. Typically only the top one percent of businesses will be at this point, says Gassman.
Where to start?
The maturity of analytics in Australia does—like ecommerce—lag a year or two behind the US. Amplify’s Petryshen suggests that it is due to a combination of a lack of knowledge and the fact that people are just too busy running their existing businesses. “Some businesses that are really successful are still just going with the flow rather than looking at the data they are often already getting and trying to make sense of that,” he adds.
For some businesses, just getting started can be a challenge. Many aren’t sure of what to track and what information to look for. Petryshen says that when he embarks on the process with a client he tries to identify relevant pieces of information that can be used to track trends, really starting with the basics. “Information such as visitor numbers from one month to the next, how many new visitors compared to repeat visitors, how many page views did those visitors look at—that kind of information, over time, will tell a story and you can at least identify if you’re moving forward or taking a steps back,” he says.
Once there is a fundamental understanding of this it becomes much easier to really move into some of the deeper levels.
The analogy made by Caslon’s Arnold is that it’s like having a sports car—you have to know how to drive it. “The problem, certainly for many SMEs, is that in most cases they don’t really go beyond the entry screen of their analytics tool. If they’re enthusiastic they’ll have a look at it once a month and see a couple of pie charts—end of story. They won’t start digging into the data, which is where the real value of this stuff comes in. Otherwise its just ego-ware,” he says.
To move far beyond this, the number one challenge is finding skills. It requires quite a specialised skills set and at the moment there is no standardisation between different vendors approaches. Gartner’s Gassman says that it is often hard to find the people who can really use the tools.
Regardless of what analytics systems you’re using the difference, adds Petryshen, is the people you have. “How can you actually take that data and make sense of it and tie it into your business goals? I don’t believe Australia has a lot of people who are skilled at that,” says Petryshen.
Gassman says the other great challenge is having the right processes in place to actually make changes. “If your analytics show that when the background is blue you get a five percent better conversion than if it’s green, how long does it take you to change that from blue to green? In some organisations it can take months. You end up with a tool that is very powerful and can show you in black and white what’s going on but people can’t react to it.” Gassman says.
