For those who saw our booth at one of the recent conferences in which we participated, hopefully you noticed the big bin o’ cash sitting on our table.
We launched the “Keep the Cash” contest to open a conversation with conference attendees and prospective clients and partners and so far it has proven to be a huge success! (More…)
I had a great time at eMetrics last week for their annual Toronto Marketing Optimization Summit. Meeting new people and hearing their issues/challenges really provided some perspective on the marketplace. There was a lot of discussion on the usual topics including Social and Mobile Metrics, Managing Web Analytics, Site Optimization….and very importantly the food was exceptional especially the Mexican cuisine on Thursday!
During one of the lunches, an attendee named Kerri was relating to me how resonant our sprint – this is the 3 minute talk we delivered right after the keynote speech – was to her, and the way her organization treats web analytics. In Peder’s sprint, he expounded upon the subpar job the whole industry has done in promoting web analytics tools by selling web analytics as Reporting Tools when they should always be presented as Optimization Tools.
Kerri elaborated that the culture of her company was built around reporting with little or no focus on optimization. When I asked her what they did with all the valuable data from the reports, she countered with the insurmountable effort of having to read 50-page web analytics reports! Of course, I was puzzled with their misuse of analytics and presumed that if no one is reading the reports then no one is making any business decisions with their analytics. While they were dissatisfied with their analytics, they didn’t seem terribly interested in streamlining reports to reflect their exact business objectives and their eventual optimization. After a conversation with her and her team yesterday, I think they might be on the right track….
Kerri certainly isn’t unique or just a small sample of what other organizations experience. So what do other companies do about the mountains of useless data to uncover important gems hidden in all those reports? I was surprised to learn that many web marketers were spending 3-4 days a month accumulating, managing and massaging the data to extract those nuggets of valuable analytics. Now, think about what the true cost of that is for an organization in matter of 12 months. Let’s assume an average salary of $70k and divide that by the average of 260 work days/year = $270 per day. Take $270 and multiply by 4, and you uncover that some organizations are spending $1,080 per month or about $13k organizing the reporting data to make sense of it! Imagine, they could shift $10k to improving the design of their site, remarketing, delivering more self-service options, improving campaigns, being capable of making better and faster business decisions – or OPTIMIZATION! How, do you ask? Using customizable dashboards that incorporate web analytics data and information from other business repositories into dashboards can deliver management insight that is actionable.
Many of the attendees were very impressed with the demo of our dashboarding technology called Montage that addresses this specific issue. If you would like to have a talk on your analytics or a quick demo of Montage, please feel free to drop me a line.
Nader Balata
Unilytics is an offcial eMetrics sponsor
As we plan to exhibit at eMetrics in San Jose, May 5 6 and 7, I felt it was great time to introduce you to our new blog! Yes, there are lots of them out there already and we are not early to write one, but we plan to offer relevancy about our industry and company. And there’s much to talk about.
Unilytics has been in the web analytics business since 2001 and we have seen enormous change. Perhaps the biggest difference is what firms are beginning to do with analytics. And how it’s being incorporated into other corporate data silos.
It’s often not enough to understand what visitors to your web site are doing, but how else are they interacting with your company? Via customer support, in-store purchases and yes, also blogging. And they are all intricately intertwined. As your web self-service portal improves a relative drop in call center requests should be observed. An old boss of mine used to say “in technology, if you stand still for six months, you’re dead“. For the upcoming eMetrics show, we have completely changed our booth to reflect our new message, which is that incorporating other systems and their data into what web analytics provides is the key. That means tying together CRM, email marketing, call-center data and how coupons printed from the web are redeemed in stores so you get the full picture of what your customers are doing and what they need.
Unilytics is an official WebTrends partner
We are of course a huge proponent of WebTrends and are pleased to see their renewed focus on making it easier to get access to the underlying data used to create all reports. This is going to create fantastic opportunities for clients as they become better aware of all aspects and needs of their web visitors.
Peder Enhorning, President Unilytics Corporation.
