Analyze This

Fall 2005 Issue: Page 98

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Web analytics polishes its customer-winning game and helps boost affiliate revenue.

Affiliates are capitalizing on the predictable behavioral patterns of consumers by using Web analytics tools to decode customers' habits and boost revenue.

So if you're a publisher and want to know who exactly is visiting your site, how different types of visitors come back, what they are looking for when they arrive and what specifically makes them want to leave, you should be thinking about tools that help you sort, analyze and understand your customers.

Web analytics is an emerging category of software that purports to answer all those questions and many more that could help you identify the steps for your site to reach the top of its game.

"Affiliates have tremendous opportunity," says Barbara Poole, a revenue improvement consultant at PoolResources.com, "because they already understand what it is to drill down to the specific customer relationships."

And if you find the right software to help with that decoding you'll already be ahead of the curve.

That's what Miami-based affiliate Pedro Sostre did. Through a collection of analytics software that includes AWStats, ClickTracks Pro and WebSideStory's HitBox, he has determined the success of ad campaigns, discovered new opportunities based on analyzing what keyword terms are being searched and routinely improved overall performance for his sites including FreeBookClub.com, iTravelMagazine.com, AudioBookDeals.com and Tax-Stuff.com.

"We use Web analytics every day," Sostre says. "When we found that 88 percent of that search engine traffic wasn't converting, we where able to save $2,000 per month at FreeBookClub on pay-perclick advertising alone."

These tools don't cost much: AWStats is free, HitBox is $30 per month and Click- Tracks' basic level is a one-time license of a few hundred dollars.

"Eliminating pay-per-click listings at Aha and Kanoodle alone saved me the cost of the software," Sostre says. "And then there is the value you get from seeing what people are looking for as far as clicks and what campaigns are working. I absolutely could not do what I do without being able to analyze the sets."

New analytics tools actually create a snapshot of who your ideal customers are and what makes them tick. And it even can determine the different types of customers your site might draw. Once you can do that, "you get the ability to really use that information," says Brent Hieggelke, vice president of software analytics company WebTrends.

Merchants and affiliates are catching on to this power. The Web analytics market grew 13 percent in 2004, marking what global market researcher International Data Corp. calls a "second coming."

Analytics has officially grown up from its beginnings a decade ago, when eyeballs and unique page impressions were all that mattered, or at least all that were measured. "Who really cares if someone is sitting on a page for 20 minutes? People have realized how dirty those metrics are," says SAS Web Analytics' Richard Foley. "Basic metrics just aren't cutting it."

So what is? There are several Web analytics advances, some still in beta, that could be huge for affiliates. Segmentation, intuitive analysis and 360-degree views are among the latest advances that have affiliates applauding.

"We just started using [analytics], and we're just blown away by the power of seeing day-to-day metrics," says Joe Beruta, director of interactive marketing for Jenny Craig, which gets anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of its online registrations through affiliates. "We used to look at the month after the fact, with no real-time metrics. Now we're looking at things like clients versus non-clients as they come to the site - and we haven't even gotten into segmentation."

Segmentation

Segmentation is the hottest way to analyze customers on the Web, and at as little as $35 per month it's finally affordable for small publishers. The technology records and visually tracks a single visitor's interactions at every touch point. Assigning each visitor a unique identifier, it compares its findings with its growing database of other users' patterns. Similar users are grouped into one segment. The more a visitor interacts with your site, either by clicking links or making purchases or answering questions about interests, the more data the technology collects on what makes that segment tick.

"It's a little bit like taking a helicopter and flying over a freeway to see where the bottlenecks are," says Michael Chavez, vice president of analytics maker ClickFox. "It's not about predicting a user's behavior; you're looking at what they actually did. And you now can link that to actual demographics."

One of the first companies to make segmentation accessible is WebTrends, which rolled out version 7.0 of its program a year ago. The latest version includes actual breakdowns of how profitable each link is and all of its segmentation tools. There's a free 14-day trial at WebTrends.com.

Today "this broad, comprehensive picture of the process is one of the absolute hot spots in the market," says WebTrend's Hieggelke.

This type of analytics can even help you find new merchants or improve the deal you have. "You get to know based on buying habits what someone wants from your company," says Mark Bradley, vice president of product shopping at shopping comparison engine NexTag. "If you know people are heading off to buy another product from a third party, then you negotiate with that merchant to get a special deal to sell it yourself."

Intuitive Analysis

With intuitive analytics, you also get recommendations specific to respective goals for sales, IT, marketing and Web design. Now, if a certain segment of customers are spending three times more time on your site, but buying half as often, the software automatically searches for commonalities like coupon codes, free shipping offers or site navigation and tells you what about your site or where the customer came from influences their buying behavior. It tells you what to keep doing to get more customers (including determining the best advertising avenues) and what to start doing to get them to shop more often.

"That's what analytics is," says Stephen Messer, CEO of LinkShare, which in May launched its Synergy Analytics application for its network of affiliates. "It says: 'Let us do the analysis that you would otherwise do on your own.'"

With basic analytics, you may conclude you bought the wrong keywords if your search engine results are down - with nothing in your reporting to tell you exactly what you did wrong. Intuitive analytics will point out six, nine, maybe 10 different things that might be affecting why search engine returns were low. It may be that your landing pages were too slow or down, it might be the time of day, it might be that you actually do have some keywords that aren't effective. Continued on Page 2...

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Tags: web analytics, software, stats, customers, feedback, traffice, websidestory, hitbox, clicktracks, awstats, search engine traffic, game, affiliate revenue, barbara poole, customer relationships, keyword terms, behavioral patterns, reach the top, predictable, curve,

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