This is post number 8 in a series of tips about how to create analytics around your customer behavior.

Given that the data is so central to marketing today, it makes sense to try to design the systems you build (web sites, online applications, mobile apps) to deliver this for you.

This can be done by designing promotions to encouraging the visitors to provide key information (like email addresses, or customer numbers) or making sure the applications surface key information (like offer prices, search criteria, product SKU’s, videos viewed etc.).

As we have discussed above, the most effective capture techniques are those that operate in the client-device, so actually you just need to arrange for the information you want/need to appear in the pages and content you display to the visitor (as this will normally be exactly what your applications are trying to do this is no hardship!).

Typically, the only thing you need to make sure is that the information is ‘identifiable’ so if you are showing the customer a ‘list price’ and price which includes ‘shipping and handling’ then just make sure that the data objects in the page are not both called ‘price’!!!

This is another reason to ensure you are talking to the marketing and online application development teams and agencies.

This is the seventh post in a series of tips about how to create analytics around your customer behavior.

If you are going to talk to individuals in a relevant way then you need data about individuals.

Knowing that yesterday 800 people searched for ‘Hotel in Essen’ and 2000 people purchased a flight to ‘Koln/Bonn’ won’t help you sell a rental car to anyone – unless you know which people did both things.

If, however, you know that Franz booked a flight to Bonn on the 22nd, added a 3-day hotel in Essen to his booking, but turned down your quote for an Audi for 200 Euros a week, then you might be able to have another shot at getting that rental sale when you send the e-mail confirmation…. But ONLY if you knew it was Franz.

Summarized data really is not getting you there – it’s great for drawing a graph – but there are no graphs that would have secured Franz’s booking – get serious, wrestle that detailed data to the ground and wring the value out of it.

This is the sixth post in a series of tips about how to create analytics around your customer behavior.

In recent years much has been said, written and discussed about web analytics. The Web Analytics Forum on Yahoo is one of the largest online community discussion groups today, with almost 6,500 members. However, web analytics has consistently failed to find a comfortable home in the modern Information Architecture or provide clear ROI – and there are two reasons for this:

• Because web analytics has focused on ‘web data’ (the name is something of a giveaway) – when the business is focused on ‘business data’
• Because it has failed to deliver data of sufficient quality and reliability to be included in the ‘warehouse’

The latest generation of data capture technologies (OCDC systems) overcome these limitations.

First, they have moved the capture function from the web server to the client device – so now we have data about customer interactions (actions, responses, behavior, environment), not data about web-server events (like hits, clicks, page impressions etc.).

Second, their analysis of this data (and the storage of the resulting information) is structured by ‘customer’ – real, live individuals (even if they remain anonymous) … as opposed to the traditional page oriented analysis or construction of rather shaky analogs of people (like ‘Unique Visitors’).

Third, by utilizing the latest AJAX, and document-object-model (DOM) and event-driven technologies the data accuracy and contextualization is on a par with the best offline ETL and data capture processes.

So stop thinking web analytics and start thinking online customer analytics – it will make more sense to the business (and to the CFO!!!).

As we say – ‘no matter how smart you are, you will never sell an upgrade to club-class to a web page – to do that you need to speak to the customer!’

This post is the fifth in a series of tips about how to create analytics around your customer behavior.

Your customers (and prospects and visitors) will compile a view of your business from a variety of sources (in-store, direct mail, call centre, advertising, web site, mobile applications, social media sites etc.) – they think about you in a ‘cross-channel way’ – their impression of you is the sum of their cross-channel experiences.

In the same way, you need to compile a cross-channel view of your customer … the person speaking to the call center IS the same person who was on the web site 10 minutes ago, was in the store last month and returned that faulty product 4 days ago. If you fail to create a common view of this individual you will make mistakes in your interaction with them.

It is true that one can never ‘know everything’ about a customer – but that’s no excuse for not trying to get it right – and ignoring the most important channel in today’s business is straight corporate suicide … because your competitors won’t!