Precision Marketing Article - 19th November 2008

More press mentions for Trovus - this time in Precision Marketing with an article on how to Listen to your website.

For more information see the Precision Marketing website

Look, Listen, Learn: Creating value from web analytics

Marketers are generally happy to look at top-line web analytics for their site, but how many are really listening to what their customers are saying through their online behaviour? And how many are using that information to learn more about the effectiveness of their online presence, and make the changes that will maximise sales?

Many marketers will be familiar with analytics packages for website reporting, ranging from the free tools, such as Google Analytics, through to enterprise packages such as Web Trends and Omniture.

These are great tools and have grown out of a history of providing information for business to consumer websites. Their focus has been around how many visitors a website gets (unique visitors), what the most popular pages are and measuring the conversion ratios on specific online campaigns. Given the right investment in time and training, these analytics tools are incredibly helpful for understanding information about a website's performance at a macro level. But how many marketers are making that investment?

Even with this data, the biggest challenge marketers face is to understand who their visitors are and more specifically what they want. This is where traditional analytics packages start to become less useful and new generation web analytics tools, more powerful.

The new tools deliver the "who and why", providing detail on the organisations visiting a website. By offering a company by company view of the content being accessed, the marketer can identify the challenges these organisations face and why they are interested in specific products and services.

Above this, they can track individual user behaviour, showing how individuals arrive at the site, either through the referring link or the language they used to find a particular web page. They can show which pages were accessed, how they were used, and how frequently that individual and their colleagues come back to the site over a sustained period. The level of detail offers marketers uniquely powerful insights into how clients and prospects behave in and around their web presence and how they view the company's products and services.

Once again, this insight is only possible if marketers invest in using the tool effectively, taking the time to analyse what the data means and relating it back to their online strategy.

Call to action

For the savvy marketer looking to understand whether their marketing campaigns hit the right target group with exactly the right need, real value lies in identifying particular organisations who respond to your marketing messages. It closes the loop on all marketing activity, online and offline, and makes marketing directly measureable for the company, giving the marketer a true ROI model.

Faced with today's severe market challenges, marketers need to ask themselves three questions. Can we see who's visiting our website and what they are looking for? Can we understand their buying patterns? Am I converting leads from my website into closed deals? If the answer is no then it's perhaps time to have a rethink.

Caspar Craven, Co-Founder, Trovus - www.trovus.co.uk

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