Online measurement key to boosting sales

Measuring online customer behaviour offers a useful insight which can result in big returns, writes Alan Hall, UK managing director of SCL Analytics

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.

For those that sell their products and services online, analysing how people are reacting to, and using, their web site should be important to them. With a small investment, a reseller 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 conversion rates from visitor to customer. That small percentage increase in conversions could translate into significant revenue.

Let’s take an example that Widget.net (not a real company), an online reseller of computers and printers, takes out a Google ad campaign for a special offer, but only applies rudimentary metrics to measure its success. Like many other companies, Widget.net only decides to count the number of advert impressions and click-throughs, which is the amount of times its advert was displayed and clicked on. A high number of counts might make the marketing team feel like its advert is a success, but they couldn’t be certain that it is impacting sales.

If Widget.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 Widget.net than counting the number of impressions and click-throughs. Visibility of this action would give Widget.net insight into how well its advertising is actually working.

Once the customer is browsing Widget.net’s web site 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 web site? If the offer deadline has expired, or that product is out of stock, the visitor to the web site is likely to leave quickly – and slightly annoyed. Or what if the visitor arrives via the Google advert, registers on the web site and then leaves after searching for colour printers? It is possible that two weeks later, the customer phones Widget.net and purchases 20 colour printers. Did the Google advert get any credit for this purchase? Or does Widget.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 Widget.net to integrate their online data with their offline sales data and get better visibility of their customers’ behaviour.

The example of Widget.net demonstrates the importance of web analytics for a reseller with an e-commerce operation. But does all of this web analytics data matter if a reseller doesn’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 VARs acquire new leads and in turn, drive up sales.

Having a web site isn’t enough in today’s competitive market. Investing in tools to exploit the information a web site can provide about customers and prospects could help resellers make small changes which could result in big financial gains.