Once upon a time, Web analytics was a fairly straightforward proposition. You kept track of a few leading indicators such as traffic, ad clickthroughs, page views and sales or other conversions (however you defined them), and you got a pretty good picture of how well your site was ticking over.
But that’s all changed now. Today Web operators who want to get a real handle on their site’s performance need to watch a lot more gauges and dials.
Part of that new complexity is due to the recognition that people can make multiple visits before buying that camera online or signing up for that newsletter. There are, it seems, a lot of doors into the average Web site, including search marketing (on branded and generic terms), RSS feeds, product or merchant reviews on third-party sites, RSS feeds, e-mail promotions and even TV ads that drive consumers to the page. E-commerce vendors who want to optimize their marketing will, it turns out, have to watch all those entrances to figure out the best way to allocate their ad dollars.
Nor can you take your eyes off those visitors once they’ve arrived. Web 2.0 features such as video, personalized start pages, and consumer-generated reviews offer plenty of new ways to interact with a site. A new standard of “engagement metrics” has grown up in Web analytics. Watching those behaviors may help you figure out which customers are nearest to whatever conversion action you hope they’ll take, allowing you to focus on giving them just that little extra push they might need to buy or sign up.
Electronics retailer Circuit City offers lots of product content in a “Click to Learn” module that appears on most of its category and product pages, and lots of consumer-generated product ratings and reviews. According to Kim Weller, the company’s senior manager of Web analytics, visitors who click on that content seem to be more likely to convert to a sale than those who don’t, and she’d like to know how much more likely.
“We have many different components on our product pages which are key for our customer research,” she says. Circuit City sees offering customers a lot of different ways to research products and topics as a point of differentiation that can keep users from going to the many competing electronics sites on the Web.
“Our goal is to give our customers the ability to do whatever research they want, find all the specifications they need, and give them the confidence they want before they buy,” says Weller.
And getting a customer to participate in—or even just consume – those content elements on the site has been a good indicator of future conversion, Weller says. “Forums and ‘Click and Learn’-type articles are things that people do early in the buying process. Forums convert the best: It’s not a huge pool of visitors who use those, but we find they’re very loyal and they do spend more money with us”—perhaps because they ask about accessories and add-ons to the products they buy, she speculates.
To track that leading-indicator user behavior, CircuitCity.com has for some time now used the Web analytics platform from Coremetrics, one of the big suppliers in the field. And Weller says they plan to turn on the tracking features of the newest version, Coremetrics 2007, as the company makes them available this quarter and next.
That new version of the Coremetrics product suite will take into account the metric changes that Web 2.0 site construction has brought about. Just for starters, page views are quickly becoming obsolete as a measure of how much someone has interacted with a site.
It used to be that an online shopper who looked at a product, clicked the “Add to Cart” button and adjusted the quantity for purchase, added shipping information and clicked to buy would detectably have visited five separate Web pages. But now merchants building Web 2.0 storefronts can let users interact quickly and easily with their pages through AJAX. Short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, it’s a Web development tool that customizes pages by exchanging small bits of data with a server, rather than reloading a whole page. It’s fast and convenient; but it makes counting page views as old hat as the Automat, and turns watching customer on-site behavior into a high-stakes guessing game.
“With Web 2.0, I can look at a page of products and filter them dynamically by price, for example, or by manufacturer,” says Brian Tomz, Coremetrics’ director of product strategy. “I can drag a product and drop it into the cart. On a portal, I can customize portions so that I can have an experience that includes fifty touches without ever getting a page refresh.”
“The page view used to be the lowest common denominator of Web measurement,” Tomz says. “But with marketers using Flash, AJAX and other tools to create a more convenient, more dynamic experience on the site, we have to take a more granular view, because a lot of interim things are happening on pages.”
Coremetrics has approached this problem by treating the pages of clients such as Circuit City as mere containers for “elements”, modules that customers can either consume as information or interact with. They can then offer tracking and reporting on these intra-page elements to give a clearer picture of user behavior.
Blending that page-level data with analysis of customer use of blogs, forums, RSS feeds and all the other ways visitors can come to the site and act once they get there, analytics customers are then able to segment their customers more accurately and target those with the highest value, or closest to a purchase, or showing the most loyalty—whatever metric is worth most to them.
Circuit City hasn’t yet deployed the full array of analytical tools available in the Coremetrics suite, but it plans to do so during the coming year, according to Weller.
“One thing I really preach is to look at comparisons and trends, because raw numbers really aren’t going to tell you much,” Weller says. “What’s the value of 70 billion page views?”