Synergy teams up with Sane to help SA Web sites maximise investments

Synergy Computing, the business intelligence specialist, has announced a partnership with Sane Solutions, the award-winning developer of NetTracker Web analytics software that has been designed to help maximise the return on Web site investments.

Under the terms of the agreement, Synergy will serve as Sane's exclusive marketing services, implementation and solutions partner for Sane solutions in sub-Saharan southern Africa and Mauritius.

"NetTracker is an easy-to-implement and affordable Web analytics solution that can help companies ensure they get the best from their Web sites," says Paul Howard, NetTracker product manager at Synergy.

"Companies often spend fortunes designing, re-designing and making changes to their Web sites without ever knowing how effective such changes are. With NetTracker, Web site design can be immediately measured by analysing the change in visitor behaviour and the design adjusted and corrected timeously," he adds.

Similarly, the return on investment of banner advertising and other web based campaigns can be measured accurately ensuring the greater effectiveness of a company's own Web-based promotions as well as those of third-parties.

"Imagine being able to record every movement of every customer in a supermarket all the time. This is what NetTracker delivers when analysing Web sites. What's more, it's at Internet speed - not a month-end, paper-based report published when it is too late to do anything about it," says Howard.

NetTracker is a fully functional, out-of-the-box, feature-rich solution that can be implemented as a standalone solution or easily integrated with existing or future BI investments. It is a highly cost-effective, best-of-breed solution that can be implemented in a fraction of the time taken by competitive products.

"Although NetTracker is traditionally used as a standalone solution to analyse site visitors' online behaviour, the fact that it can also become part of a comprehensive customer analysis solution utilising standard BI solutions, is one if its strengths," he adds.

NetTracker eBusiness Edition with a BI solution provides companies with the same Web data mining functionality as competitive high-end Web analytics solutions.

The system allows users to "slice and dice" Web data from the NetTracker data warehouse into a BI solution, allowing analysts to further "mine" Web site traffic data. Also, Web data can be combined with offline customer data such as resides in CRM or ERP systems so that a complete 360-degree view of customers is established.

"NetTracker eBusiness Edition is affordably priced because, unlike its competitors, advanced analytical capabilities such as OLAP and data mining functionalities are not built into the solution.

"Most companies that need Web analytics would typically already have such BI tools in place. They don't need to buy them within a clickstream analysis solution. If you already own a BI solution, you already own the advanced analytical processing capabilities. There's no need to duplicate costs," says Howard.

NetTracker's advanced functionality includes providing users with sophisticated Web site traffic reporting capabilities, such as customisable clickstream analysis and analysis of e-commerce server data.

In addition, the system enables easy shopping cart and online purchasing analysis as well as the evaluation of the effectiveness of banner ads, links, e-mail promotions and search engines.

Visitors can be segmented by their interests - products and pages viewed for example - and then targeted accordingly in future sales and marketing campaigns. Click-through paths can also be evaluated, a site's "stickiness" determined and the buying behaviour of new versus repeat visitors compared.

"The use of Web analytics in SA has been constrained mainly by the high price and narrow focus and functionality of most solutions. Coupled with our own business intelligence expertise, we're aiming to introduce a new level of Web analytics reporting to SA including the integration of online visitor data with traditional offline customer data sources," concludes Howard.