Interactively Analyzing Web Data in “Business Time”
In the web analytics world, the past 3-4 months of behavior data is like a lifetime for a web visitor, and marketing managers are craving more insights faster, such as:
- Understanding key behavior differences between first time and repeat visitors (getting customers vs. retaining customers)
- Identifying niche segments of high-frequency repeat visitors (above 5-10 visits per month) who view content (across visits or in the same visit), spend more time on key pages, and get routed from top referrer sites
- Analyzing geo-based behavioral/affinity differences to better optimize ad placements across international web properties
Such rich analysis on a near real-time basis helps highlight early trends or changes in visitor behavior and allows companies to course-correct or exploit as appropriate. To meet this need for deep visitor insights, web analytics tools must meet two fundamental requirements:
- Analysis over any combination of, or even all, attributes that are present in the data set (allowing the thoughts forming real-time in a business manager’s head to decide these attributes vs. some limited, generic pre-built models)
- Highly interactive analysis ability (over millions of rows of clickstream data) everyday vs. canned reports and pre-defined drilldown paths(i.e. limitations)
Most web analytics tools simply cannot answer #1 above as they first have to pre-aggregate (see this article) their clickstream data to provide for the operational and canned “business-oriented” daily reports - in the process, losing valuable information that is critical to unearth segment-specific behavior. Analyzing ground-up in various ways, with or without specific visitor segments in mind, is critical to spotting recent trends in visitor behavior and then allowing companies to target them with quick changes to ad or content placements.
Quantivo web analytics does not need to even think about pre-aggregating clickstream data, given its unique ability to quickly pick up just the required information from clickstream data based on the segments and data subsets featured in the query definition. Quantivo can also easily process more complex segmentation queries through its multi-pass query capabilities, processing that typical BI and web analytics tools need deep customization and extensions to perform.
Quantivo’s easy ability to do interactive ad hoc train-of-thought analysis based on what’s seen in the data meets #2 mentioned above, thus giving decision makers what they need to make a difference vs. what they want normally (which many analysts unfortunately spend a long time accessing in typical tools). The time it takes to get to such information in typical tools forces the decision makers to avoid asking the far more difficult questions - timely answers to which could make a real difference to profitability and market share in real “business time.”
(Here’s another related article.)
Tags: web analytics
April 13th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
[...] Here’s a great article on how you can answer these questions in “business time,” giving you what you need to make an impact today vs. giving up on the time or hassle of trying to do it with your current tools. The time it takes to get such value today is causing you to avoid asking the far more difficult questions - and timely answers to those questions could make a real difference to getting, keeping, and growing your visitors, transactions, and revenues! [...]