Opinion: Track and field

Fanni Vig on how web tracking can help your business grow.

The principle of tracking and analysing visitors’ movements on your website, and knowing who or where those people are from, has a strong business case for both B2B and B2C sectors. Your website is your property, and in order to maintain it as a functional, resourceful, client-focused domain, it helps to know who is using it and in what way. After all, when someone visits your office they have to sign in at reception, so why should a website be any different? And if that reception area was poorly laid-out and confusing for visitors, wouldn’t you want to know about it so you could fix it?

Unmasking your prospects
In our ‘biggest is best’ culture, it is all too easy to lose sight of the finer details. This applies to website traffic as well, where an informal conversation between web managers or marketing directors can often sound like a competition to see who has the most ‘hits’ on their site. However, for most businesses – particularly professional services – it is not the quantity of traffic that counts but the quality. Of course, driving high levels of traffic to a website is valuable for all businesses, but it is the percentage of relevant users – prospective clients – and knowing who they are that is crucial. This is where tracking software has the edge over other analytics packages; while the latter only shows traffic patterns, the former tells the story behind those statistics. It supplies you with the finer details, giving you valuable intelligence, including identity and areas of interest, on those that really matter to your business.
Another string to web tracking’s bow is the data it collects on how visitors arrived at your site. This allows you to see which search engines were used to access your site, and which search terms were applied, enabling you to adapt and improve ongoing search engine optimisation or adwords campaigns.

Software as a solution
The simple corollary of discovering who is browsing your site is happier business development and marketing departments. Where in the past they might have taken a scattergun approach to lead generation, prior knowledge of interested parties produces more focused lines of enquiry. With the intelligence that tracking brings, target audiences can be segmented, and specific strategies drawn up for each one. Further marketing opportunities can benefit greatly from this sort of planning. For example, a contacts database can be organised to show high or low priority contacts and their specific areas of interest. E-shots or direct mail can then be sent out with confidence that they will hit their intended target, bringing higher click-through rates or responses. In this way, website tracking should be seen as more of an all-round marketing solution, rather than a piece of software bolted on to analyse the role of your online communications.

Proving it internally
The advantages of web tracking solutions are not confined to external audiences either. The results can be used to demonstrate real return-on-investment from online platforms and initiatives, or to show where current web communications are failing. In these harsh economic times, parsimonious boards can be reluctant to sign off budgets if there is a suspicion that precious funds are being frittered away on fruitless marketing projects. Showing up at an internal meeting armed with proof that your website is, or could be, generating business leads is a powerful negotiating weapon. The data is also highly accessible and easy for non-technical people to digest, which increases the impact of the results when using them internally to pitch for new budgets.
Now, if you’re struggling to get funds for this kind of software solution, it always helps to have a few key points to rattle off to decision-makers. So, here are the raw details that should convince even the most frugal of CFOs or CEOs that web tracking is a long-term solution for increasing your online revenue-generating ability.

Devil in the detail

Company profiling: Data can be compiled to build up in-depth profiles on an organisation-by-organisation basis. Assembling an entire view of a company is a powerful piece of knowledge to have;
Watch list alerts: The ‘watch list’ facility delivers automatic email alerts on specific companies, as and when they browse your site;
ISP list filtering: This feature sorts the wheat from the chaff, showing relevant traffic from organisations and binning whole volumes of traffic;
Individual page drill-downs: Every single page on the website can be identified and analysed, showing every organisation that has looked at that page; and,
Searchable database: A searchable database of companies can be built, which you then categorise, tag and export to integrate with your existing internal systems (CRM, marketing databases and so on).

In addition to all the internal and external reasons for using web tracking to help you understand your visitors better and capture new business, there is another ongoing benefit that often gets overlooked. The data collected over many months can be kept and used to plan future website developments. Too often websites get built without any proper research into visitor types and how these groups behave. Where basic web analytics programmes only give amounts and numbers, web tracking gives you names and fields of interest, enabling you to build an intricate picture of who comes and goes on your website.

Fanni Vig is head of business development at Intendance. She can be contacted at fanni.vig@intendance.com