Turning clicks into customers

Analysis of customer behaviour and preferences is key to the success of any business.

"Analysis helps business managers make informed decisions, and understand the results of those decisions," says Marc Scheepbouwer, marketing director at Global Technology Business Intelligence, (GBI) a company specialising in the provision of services and solutions to the local and international business community.

With e-business increasingly tied to the success of the entire company, every gain in effectiveness and success of the e-business channel results in the further success of a company. A continual effort to improve e-business effectiveness is imperative, Scheepbouwer maintains.

"A key to success in this market is to make the most of each customer interaction; plus ensure that they stay as long as possible, quickly and easily find their way what they are after, return often, and enjoy a positive experience each time they visit. The most important e-business challenge is turning clicks into customers.

Research, he says, has shown that visitors abort between 18% and 42% of pages on slow loading sites, and therefore never get the intended value which those pages contain.

Web traffic offers insight into visitor behaviour such as where the visitors come from and what they viewed. However, Scheepbouwer says, what business managers can learn is limited to what can be directly observed from the website traffic. For example, analysis of Website traffic data cannot show whether or not calls to customer support have decreased.

"A powerful e-business analysis solution or business intelligence tool provides information to help companies evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts, refine and improve those activities, and reach their business objectives. E-business analysis, which involves combining data from other sources with the Web traffic data, allows managers to get a more complete picture of the website and its role in the success of the e-business."

For example, integrating customer support data with the website traffic data allows business managers to see if calls to customer support are decreasing due to improved Web-based customer support. Moreover, combining website activity with data from other sources (such as visitor profile information, sales databases, and information about campaigns that include links to the website) provides more powerful information and focused answers, and allows improvements to the website as well as other e-business activities. "The integration of other data with the Website activity data allows true e-business analysis. It increases the potential for qualitative analysis, and provides answers to questions outside the scope of Web traffic analysis." Scheepbouwer says most businesses make 80% of their profits from less than 20% of their customers. Quickly understanding who the most valuable visitors are and what market segments they represent is key to focusing sales and marketing efforts towards them.

Redesigning ineffective sites can result in dramatically improved customer conversion rates.

He maintains it is difficult to anticipate the ways in which the Web will be used in the future and to understand and meet the challenges of measuring and analysing its effectiveness. Thus tools used by Web professionals need to be flexible: they must be able to adapt to and support new and evolving technologies, shifting goals and purposes, and increasing volumes of traffic.

Scheepbouwer advises that the investment in sophisticated, enterprise-scale e-business analysis and reporting solutions like those provided by Accrue Software provide a tangible, quantifiable return in a number of areas. "Employing sophisticated Web analysis and reporting applications can result in substantial improvements in visitor response, and also improvements in advertising revenue dependent on increased referrals from one site to another."

Accrue`s Insight(r) product range, for example, provides a host of value-add data capture and analysis functions necessary to improve conversation rates and decrease `click to content" number. Insight allows a website to be tuned in real-time, providing near immediate traffic feedback as modifications are made and traffic patterns are adjusted.

For example, it can provide information about: what customers do on a site, how long they stay, how often they come back, what they buy. Additional information provided by Accrue`s solutions includes path analysis by customer segment and site content popularity and effectiveness for different customer segments.

"Accrue`s solutions can turn clicks into customers and enable companies to increase revenue," comments Scheepbouwer. Through business intelligence solutions like Accrue`s, companies can know their customers and channel traffic into satisfied customers.

"Given that e-businesses spend millions of dollars drawing visitors to their websites, it goes without saying that converting these visitors to happy customers is crucial to the continued success of the business. Further, the connection between converting visitors to buyers and their success in navigating the website is obvious," he adds.