…and what do you do?
After travelling for a year in 2003 I came back and took a job in the new and emerging area of web analytics.
Friends, family and people I met began asking The Question again (some more than once!) and as I gave my long winded answer I detected a greater level of interest than I had before. There seemed to be an opportunity, but I needed to get it across in a more digestible way. An analogy was required – supermarket shelf stacking.
Web analytics is like product placement on supermarket shelves. Supermarkets use every trick in the book from puffing bakery air onto customers making them feel more hungry as they enter the shop to placing frequent buy products like milk and eggs at the back of the store so customers have to walk past other products on their way to pick up the two things they came in for. Supermarkets also place more expensive items at eye level and slightly to the right because we read and browse from left to right. The eye then comes to rest on them. Related products are grouped together in continuously different ways to improve cross sell. The list is endless…
Web analysis is essentially part of the same process but taken online. Data is studied so we can understand what our customers are like, why they have come to the site, what they are interested in and what their journey through the site is like. When we’ve reached the limits of the data we turn to usability in its various guises and to online surveys. I think this is like the mortar that fills in the gaps as we build our impression of how customers are behaving online and from there how we can best meets their needs.
The result is that we go and tinker with the web pages to make sure that we are putting products and the most tempting messages in the best places to help the potential customer find what they came to buy.
The principle isn’t much more complicated than that, the techniques are. The object here and in the work that we do with our clients is to illustrate the idea, point out that it works in the same way it work for supermarkets (very well), and suggest that it’s worth doing and that if it’s done well it can pay for itself.
