There are two principal types. 'Free' tools like Google Analytics and Yahoo's Index Tools offer first-rate solutions for quite deep analytics around figures such as the number of visits, bounces and sales the site has achieved, and over what period. Then you have the more advanced solutions, like Omniture, WebTrends and Nedstat, which can make these details more bespoke, identifying key metrics such as timelag from arrival to sale, user journey and basket values.
When looking at who visited the site, the more advanced tools can recognise IP addresses (the principle 'identifier' for any standard internet connection) which, when used with additional data, can start to give you an estimate of where people have come from - from location to business name.
Privacy law means that cookie-based tracking can't offer personally identifiable information, so to get a greater understanding of who's visiting the site we need to tap into how people make themselves known. There is a new wave of tools that allow us to know more about our audience.
For example, MyBlogLog, now owned by Yahoo, is a registration-based community of blog readers. Anyone can sign up to be a member and allow their identity to be seen by other MyBlogLog users if they have the code installed on the page.
Another method being promoted by Clicky Web Analytics, www.getclicky.com, was developed to help blog owners understand who is on the site through blog commentary. Clicky works to match back the IP address of any person that has left a comment on the blog - this being their method of identifying themselves - enabling the analytics tool to identify the visitors' behaviour on the site historically by matching back the data and moving forward by remembering the details.
With bespoke tools, we can start to understand more about visitors and in turn attempt to connect with them. The next question to consider will be the 'why' - for instance, why someone visited or why someone didn't buy from the site. Such questions are sometimes solved with onsite surveys and it will be interesting to see if, with this wave of personalisation, the answers start to become clearer.
Successful analytics management will involve the collation of many different sources of data, a combined understanding of all the channels and an ability to act quickly to connect with visitors.
But until we have a single solution that gives us all the information in one place, you can start to build a good picture of how people engage with your business online by making sure that you have the right tools for the right jobs and not being afraid to use as many as you need.
CASE STUDY - EASYJET
Client: easyJet
Supplier: WebTrends
Brief: To improve the online business
Target audience: New and returning customers
Budget: Undisclosed
Andrew Berks, brand communications manager at low-cost flight operator easyJet, chose to work with analytics provider WebTrends to ensure that the site was optimising conversions in the competitive online travel environment. More than 95 per cent of business comes from its global websites, so it is important to turn visitors from 'lookers to bookers'.
Berks says that the first immediate benefit the brand recognised involved evaluating the efficiency of the 'booking funnel' - a series of individual web pages that begin with identifying a flight and culminate in the completion of a payment: "Once people have hit the landing page, we want to help them move from a flight search to actually booking their tickets."
One discovery related to the best way in which to promote ancillary products such as car rental and hotels alongside flights. Berks says: "We noticed that the 'dwell time' per step went up significantly on the promotion-heavy pages within the booking process and quickly realised that we needed to be very careful about inundating users with offers."
This realisation prompted a redesign of the display of secondary products to ensure they are presented more clearly and simply. The result of this was an increase in conversions - in particular a 38 per cent increase in the take-up of the car rental offering.
Also noted was a decrease in dwell time in the booking funnel, vindicating the fine-tuning of the pages and indicating that people were now moving through the site more efficiently.
POWER POINTS
- Free tools provide analytics for figures such as number of site visits, bounces and sales
- More bespoke solutions identify key metrics such as timelag from arrival to sale, user journey and basket values
- A new generation of tools offer a greater insight into who is using a website and why.