*Jennifer Wilson is Senior Product Manager for WebTrends, a leading provider of web analytics and consumer-centric marketing intelligence solutions. Throughout her career, Jennifer has focused on providing data and insight to drive business decisions, and she continuously looks for solutions to help marketers achieve their business goals. During her 3 years at WebTrends, she helped bring the company's Visitor Intelligence and Score to market. EcommerceBytes Insider sat down with Jennifer to get some tips on how online merchants can use web analytics to improve sales.
**EBI: What is Web analytics, and why is it important?
Jennifer Wilson: This is the official definition of web analytics from the Web Analytics Association Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage. As the online world has matured, this definition of web analytics has actually expanded, especially in the area of optimization.
The first generation of web analytics was focused on collection. The second generation focused on measurement, analysis, and reporting. And the third generation of web analytics is really focused on optimization, not just of your web site, but of your business as a whole. It's no longer enough to just know how many people visited your web site. Ecommerce businesses need to understand who those people are, what they've done in the past, how else they interact with their organization offline, etc. This insight will drive more relevant and timely interactions with your customers, resulting in sales.
Since ecommerce sites exist to drive revenue, sales is king. Three basic steps for maximizing online revenue are - acquire, convert, and retain. First, you need to drive the right visitors to your site. Its not just about the number of visitors - they need to be ones who are likely to buy. Once they are on your site, you want them to easily find the products or services they are looking for and be able to purchase them. Once they become a customer, you want them to continue to be your customer in the future. It all sounds so simple - but it's not!
EBI: How difficult is it for owners of ecommerce websites to take data and turn it into information that actually tells them something useful about how people are using their sites or about the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns?
Jennifer Wilson: The biggest struggle for ecommerce folks when it comes to web analytics is wading through mountains of data to find the relevant insight. Understanding the basic metrics associated with campaign effectiveness and site usage is fairly straightforward, but rarely actionable. Only when digging into the details, do you start to uncover the real insight.
For instance, say you just launched a campaign promoting new Spring inventory and see that you have 20% more click-throughs than your prior year's campaign garnered. Successful, right? Not so fast. You've spent quite a bit more money this year in some other channels to drive traffic to your site. Which of those channels is working? Which channels are driving purchases, not just browsing?
Put yourself in the shoes of the marketer here - would you rather have 1000 people come to your site and 10 of those visitors make a purchase, or 30 people come to your sight and 15 of them make a purchase? The challenge for online merchants today is focusing enough attention in the right areas, as it's easy to get lost in the perpetual cycle of analysis.
EBI: What are the five key things online merchants should know about Web analytics to help them improve the effectiveness of their websites?
Jennifer Wilson: 1) Just because you can measure it, doesn't mean you should. Ask yourself how you plan to use the data to change your business. If you can't answer that, you probably don't need to focus on it.
2) Focus on the actionable data. Constantly ask yourself the question, "so what?" If your answer doesn't lead to action, you probably shouldn't focus on that metric.
3) Make decisions backed by data. Don't fall into the "way we always do it" trap. Online behavior changes so rapidly that what worked last week may not work this week. And the current economic conditions don't help much either. Be sure to use current, relevant data to support your business decisions.
4) Ensure a common understanding of the data. Make sure all the people using the data understand what it means and how it should and shouldn't be used. There's nothing worse than thinking you're making data-driven decisions only to discover you weren't using the right data.
5) Take a step back. Periodically, get a higher level perspective of what's going on with your ecommerce site. Reflect on trends in the market and look at how those are reflected in the activity on your site. Sometimes you get so buried in the data that you forget to think about what you're not seeing in the data. Think about the other opportunities you have to acquire new customers, convert them, and retain them long term.
