Did you ever wonder why the milk is always at the back of the grocery store? It’s the science of retailing in action and built from analyses of carefully tracked data patterns. Store executives know that you’ll walk through the aisles to get to the milk and probably see something else you need.
That doesn’t happen very often online. Only one in five companies even bothers to track where customers go on a Web site. This can easily lead to abandoned shopping carts, countless lost sales and scores of frustrated customers who won’t think twice before they click over to competitors’ sites.
Web analysis is marketing 101. You track where people go, what they like and what they don’t like — then plan campaigns or make adjustments accordingly. In the online world, tracking how a consumer wanders through a store and buys milk — or anything else — is termed “path analysis.” Yet in the offline world it’s simply figuring out that consumers will likely buy some cookies on their way to the milk section.
Palo Alto Software helps people write professional business plans. The company analyzes its Web data daily and noticed that many visitors to its Web site were clicking away at a particular ordering page for its “Business Plan Pro” product. Palo Alto trimmed some of the excess content on that page, changed its layout and ultimately improved the order rate by 50%. So the data drove the decision — and fixed what could have been a very real drop-off in revenue.
Online analysis can affect offline activities, too.
Camera maker Olympus recently held a sweepstakes for consumers to win an all-expenses-paid vacation by returning a coupon to its brick-and-mortar stores. Based on the analysis, Olympus discovered that the Web was a much more effective promotional vehicle than traditional media. So the company shifted a lot of its future promotions online.
Online or offline, you need to qualify who’s likely to buy your product. Let’s say you’re selling cars. A person walks onto the lot, peeks in a window and leaves. Another person peeks in a window, walks into the showroom, asks for a brochure and talks to a salesman. Who’s more likely to buy? And who should you focus your marketing efforts on if you’re trying to convert this contact into a sale?
The answer is pretty obvious — and while offline marketers pay close attention to qualifying visitors, it’s something to which the online world must pay much closer attention.
Rand Schulman has worked in the marketing and product management fields for 28 years. He’s currently senior director of WebTrends at NetIQ Corp., where he focuses on the strategic direction for WebTrends’ Web analytics products.
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