Web analytics can boost online conversion rates

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 06 October 2009 04:41

IT Industry - Market

Pool says web analytics solutions can have organizations swimming in vast amounts of customer data overnight, but that the real question is “how much of this customer data is used to make actionable, timely decisions to improve the customer experience and maximize marketing effectiveness?"

Back in April 2007, research by Aberdeen showed that 89 percent of best-in-class companies used, or planned to use, web analytics solutions as a method to measure corporate goals, such as improving the customer experience.

However, in its September 2009 report, Aberdeen found that 28 percent of these top performing companies admitted that the data delivered by a web analytics solution was difficult to interpret, with 22 percent of best-in-class companies still struggling to derive actionable insights from analytics data two years later.

Aberdeen says that, as a result, an increasing number of respondents are engaging vendors with strong professional service offerings despite having access to ‘freemium’ solutions that provide data but “little direction on how to maximize the use of the data for better business
decisions.”
 
The research firm says that in times of economic turmoil, companies cannot afford to be plagued with “information overload” in their attempt to better understand the wants and needs of their customers.

Other findings from the report show that best-in-class companies share common characteristics, such as 69 percent have a process for disseminating online data to key personnel in the organisation and 68 percent have defined performance metrics to measure online success.