Online measurement key to boosting sales
Measuring online customer behaviour offers a useful insight which can result in big returns
Customers have become increasingly savvy and demanding, expecting products to be available to buy in-store, online or through mail order. The opportunity for businesses to make a sale and retain loyalty has never been so vast – but they need to be able to reach their customers at the right time, with the right information to do that. With marketing spend under tight scrutiny, how can an organisation on a budget be certain that their pounds are being filtered into the right activities? And how can they learn what switches their customers on, and what drives them away?
Lord Kelvin, a pioneer of modern physics, once said, "If you cannot measure it, you can not improve it." This point still bears relevance over one hundred years later, within a thoroughly modern context – the internet.
You may sell your products and services online, so analysing how people are reacting to, and using, your website should be important to you. With the help of web analytics, an organisation can start to learn about its customers and prospects through analysing its web data. A few simple tweaks, such as making contact details or terms and conditions more prominent, could lead to a modest improvement in your conversion rates from visitor to customer. That small percentage increase in conversions could translate into significant revenue.
Let’s take the fictional example of Printers.net (not a real company), an online reseller of computers and printers, takes out a Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ad campaign for a special offer, but only applies rudimentary metrics to measure its success. Like many other companies, Printers.net only decides to count the number of ad impressions and click-throughs, which is the amount of times its ad was displayed and clicked on. A high number of counts might make the marketing team feel like its PPC ad is a success, but they couldn’t be certain that it is impacting sales.
If Printers.net applied an extra layer of analysis, it could measure how many times visitors clicked on the Google ad to get to its web site and whether they made a purchase. Statistics showing a high volume of conversions from visitor to purchaser would be more valuable to Printers.net than counting the number of impressions and click-throughs. Visibility of this action would give Printers.net insight into how well its advertising is actually working.
Sample Affinium NetInsight Google Paid Keywords Report
Once the customer is browsing Printers.net’s website to take advantage of the special offer, will the information in the advert match what the visitor will see when they click-through and arrive at the website? If the offer deadline has expired, or that product is out of stock, the visitor to the website is likely to leave quickly – and slightly annoyed. Or what if the visitor arrives via the Google advert, registers on the website and then leaves after searching for colour printers? It is possible that two weeks later, the customer phones Printers.net and purchases 20 colour printers. Did the Google advert get any credit for this purchase? Or does Printers.net believe that both the advert and the offer are not driving revenue and cancel both when, in reality, they have been the most successful channels to secure sales. Taking the analysis to the next level will allow Printers.net to integrate their online data with their offline sales data and get better visibility of their customers’ behaviour.
The example of Printers.net demonstrates the importance of web analytics for an organisation with an e-commerce operation. But does all of this web analytics data matter if you don’t sell online? Absolutely. A visitor downloading a white paper, or registering for a newsletter could be viewed as a ‘conversion event’ – this kind of information can help you acquire new leads and in turn, drive up sales.
Having a website isn’t enough in today’s competitive market. Investing in tools to exploit the information your website can provide you with about your customers and prospects could help you make small changes which could result in big financial gains.
