Understanding the behaviour behind the statistics

Web analytics give marketers a fascinating insight into their customers, explains Jeremy Willmott, User Experience and Design Manager at Visit London.

Web analytics can feed into some people's obsessions with numbers, graphs and charts, but what's really fascinating is the insight these statistics give marketers into their customers - because it's the behaviour behind the statistics that reveals what people are doing on your site, what provides a trigger for them to buy and how you can improve your overall online marketing.

With a growing interest in customer behaviour rather than the numbers themselves, the metrics we focus on at Visit London have evolved from page views and visitors to critical key performance indicators (KPIs) that we measure the success of our business on, such as conversions from 'lookers to bookers', drop-out rates and the number of people registering with us on the site.

Web analytics is really useful in marrying customer behaviour with the demographics information we have from registrations on our site to give us a complete profile of our customer base.

This helps us understand how we can target high-value customer segments more effectively.

It also helps us understand what persuades people to do something online - whether it's making a purchase, registering with the site or watching a video, for example - so we know what messages, channels and creative users respond to and when to engage them.

We use this understanding of user behaviour in several ways.

It features in management reports, so senior management can really understand how we're performing, measure this effectively against KPIs and obtain a snapshot of operations at any one time.

It also feeds into content generation, site rebuilds, marketing campaigns, or practically anything else we do that touches our customers.

One of the main benefits of web analytics is the single view it delivers of all our marketing campaigns and site performance.

Before, we might have had one agency sending us back a report on a search engine marketing campaign in China, another agency reporting on a banner ad campaign in India, and a further agency in the UK reporting on natural search results.

Web analytics ties everything together so we can look at all measurable elements of one campaign running across multiple digital channels and measure its impact on different regions.

This means that we can optimise campaigns as they're running to improve response rates.

While a campaign is live, we can analyse what's working most effectively and drill down into sub-sets in marketing channels to find out whether MSN or Google is delivering better results on a search engine marketing campaign, for example.

Based on these results, we can transfer marketing spend to the creative and channels producing the best results.

It also helps us work out how well we're driving traffic to our marketing partners.

This information can then be used to improve the customer experience.

For example, after noticing that a lot of visitors to our site were searching for travel information to reach London attractions, we are now talking with Transport for London about integrating some of their travel planning tools on our site to benefit both of us.

One of the benefits of the web is that marketers can be more experimental than they might be offline, as it's less costly to shift marketing spend around and you can also measure the benefits online more effectively.

With web analytics providing customer information to back us up, we can innovate and try out new things in every campaign to test how effective they are.

For example, at the end of last year, we started advertising on internet radio in the US.

We didn't invest much in the first instance, but found it incredibly effective, so in our next campaign we will be transferring more marketing spend into this channel.

Web analytics has significantly improved how we operate: we understand users better, we can respond faster, optimise campaigns as they're running, and develop new content around things users are searching for.

The next step for us is tying demographic information and customer behaviour with content management systems, so that we can automate our response depending on a user's behaviour and location.

For example, if someone enters a competition for the theatre, we know that this person is interested in the theatre, so why not go one step further and send him or her a discount voucher to attend the theatre the following week? Ultimately it's not just about number crunching, but acting on the information web analytics delivers and using it in conjunction with other data to target customers more effectively.

Web analytics has evolved to provide the business tools that organisations need - and will continue to be key for us as we look to gain an even deeper understanding of our user base going forward.

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