Knowing what your customers want or need, I believe, is the type of intelligence that is best obtained from internal data, rather than market studies. While the latter are a good source of market intelligence and trends, a more focused “consumer centric tracking” will ensure that we are better prepared to serve our consumers’ needs. The possibilities could be endless, from right targeting of offers, to lower acquisition costs, to greater conversion and monetization. I spoke about the customer focus (http://www.analyticsheaven.com/2010/01/customer-is-always-right.html), and now we need to ensure that our tracking is helping us achieve some of the benefits identified in that approach.
Achieving this level of granularity may be tricky, given consumer privacy issues, but we can aggregate user data in the right buckets to define our unique segments, design a scorecard to monitor appropriate metrics and create a process to quickly supplement our offerings to changing user needs.
While I talked about measuring the value of web traffic by promotion source, here the theory is that we build an understanding of user segments. For instance, if we are a content site, we may want to learn about the browsing behavior of our sports readers, segmented into say, MLB/NBA/Olympics/Soccer fans, etc. Metrics such as, time spent on the site, navigation pattern to other site sections, number of pages per visit, frequency of visits per month, shopping tendencies, awareness towards brands, etc. Following these segments may yield better returns per marketing dollars spent than a wide targeting of content and offers through the generic sports page.
What this data does is that it helps define our user experience, site navigation and product offers that are truly unique to this user segment. And we need to respect the findings to an extent that if our sports readers tell us that they are not interested in shopping (hypothetically), then we make the experience richer by showing them more content and leaving out the “useless” product ads from their pages – talk of a no-frills attached user experience. How else does one define relevance and targeting?
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