I wasn't surprised to hear from ClickThinking's Peter Stewart that his company had trounced tough global competition to win top kudos in the US-based Web Analytics Association's (WAA) Web Analytics Championship.
Set up by the likes of Google, Yahoo, Core Metrics, Web Trends, Walt Disney and Omniture, the WAA's competition is all about promoting Web analytics - the science of getting people to your site and ensuring that once there, they do what your business needs them to do. In short, Web analytics is about getting the Web to deliver to business objectives and the bottom line.
As SA invests heavily in ICT infrastructure in the run-up to 2010, the telecoms industry shakes off Telkom's draconian legacy to become more competitive, and the laying of more undersea cables promote access, there's growing opportunity for entrepreneurs in the convergent space. Peter Stewart's ClickThinking shows how smart, outward-looking business models can accrue enviable pound and dollar revenue, with 60% of ClickThinking's revenue derived offshore and the business growing in leaps and bounds.
"When we started in '98 we quickly realised that a fundamental requirement in the search market was to understand how to drive traffic to Web sites. I'm talking the days before Google was around, yet we intuitively knew that Internet search engines played a critical role in driving traffic and marketing services. What we did was to reverse engineer the algorithms for search engines, which dictate how they rank results. Because of this we managed to get our clients well-listed in search engines, and brought huge return on investment to them."
This led to ClickThinking building a specialised functional design team with a strong accent on driving traffic, but ensuring traffic that reaches a sight is converted. "If you are selling something or have a commercial site, it is crucial that you have the ability to capture traffic or persuade those visitors to your site to act. If you look at top catalogue sites in the US they convert twenty to twenty seven percent of all traffic to a sale. One of four visitors means a conversion to money, and there are very few agencies with the skill to manage this process," says Stewart.
Engaging the right person at the right time with relevant information and appropriate calls to action can turn traffic into money.
Peter Stewart, ClickThinking
ClickThinking's client strategies focus predominantly on the northern hemisphere, where they work with a number of local and international companies, including the Taj Hotel Group in India, The British Council in the United Kingdom and top ad agencies like JWT, TBWA and Draft FCB. While South Africans have been slow to take to the Web because of access and cost, Stewart believes boom time is around the corner. "The last 24 to 36 months have been ticking with big growth in specific sectors and this will see companies getting a lot more sophisticated in their Web strategies. What companies who are moving online to use the Web as a business channel need to understand is how a focus on continuous improvement and converting site visitors to action can significantly impact their return on investment. Engaging the right person at the right time with relevant information and appropriate calls to action can turn traffic into money."
What's the golden rule for building bottom line with Web businesses? Stewart, who was flown by Microsoft to Redmond as part of the MSN search champs program to show the tech giant how it's done, says there are three key elements to success. "You need to drive traffic to your Web, qualify traffic by targeting the right people who are interested in purchasing your product or service, and then you need to convert by causing them to take action on your site."
In part, it's ClickThinking's sassy understanding of what creates delivery on business objective and their uniquely creative approach that helped them beat out big search companies in the US to win the WAA accolade. This bodes well for the local Web marketing industry, because it shows that local is 'lekker' and we have the IP to take on the world and win.
A columnist for ITWeb and Brainstorm, Mandy de Waal microblogs at Twitter, vlogs at Zoopy and authors her own blog, Artificial Intelligence.
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