OX2 Web Analytics Blog

Following the example of Julien with his research on the web analytics tools used by CAC40, IBEX35 and DAX30 companies, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the 2006 and 2007 BeCommerce Awards winners (see post BeCommerce Awards 2007) as well, to get an idea if the best of Belgian eCommerce is doing any web analytics überhaupt and which is their prefered tool.

To be complete, I also included the companies which were attributed the BeCommerce Label (and this for the first time in Belgium). These companies received this label as their ecommerce website fullfilled different conditions such as respecting the privacy, solving complaints, prtecticting minors, etc.
As they respresent the best of breed, I wondered if they analyse their web site behavior to improve their Return On Investment?

Let’s start with the list of winners and label owners, and the web analytics tool they use:

Comments regarding the results…

A lot of Google Analytics! 42%. Why? It’s free and gives a basic view of your site behavior. However it doesn’t provide any indepth commerce analysis linked to this site behavior, although you can include info regarding revenue, product SKU, product family and quantity ordered. And it it is possible to link it to your AdWords reports, and to other campaign types to a certain level.
The question is of course: do any of these companies really make use of the basic commerce features within GA? I am very curious about it, so I invite them to comment in this post.

Four of the sites are even using a second tool, in most of the cases we are talking about a basic counter, such as StatCounter adn Belstat. I have n idea why they are doing this. Maybe it is something that is still included from the beginning and tehy forgot to remove it, but these statistics doesn’t give us any valuable information.
3Suisses is also using Edatis, which offers solutions for online marketing, including a web statistics package. I jnow to little about this tool to comment, but it looks like they have ecommerce reports included as well.

We also bumped into 1 PHPMyVisits, which is a free tool as well but it doesn’t include any commerce integration at all.

In total 68% uses a Web Analytics tool based on a tagging solution. Which isn’t bad.
However, by just clicking some random pages on the different sites, I quickly saw that not all sites were tagged appropriate. In other words, not all pages had a tag included. For example, Fortis and BikkembergsFootball. Both are using Google Analytics, but not all pages have been tagged correctly. For BikkembergsFootball even only the homepage is tagged, probably because the rest of this very nice looking web site is pure flash, and let’s be honest, it takes some time to tag a flash site appropriately.
This also means that the reports become far from reliable.
We often see clients struggling with the process of automated inclusion of tagging their website. Different solutions are possible but I refer you to a recent post of Julien titled ‘On tag placement and related mechanisms…‘.

And finally, 32% doesn’t use a visible web analytics tool, clearly illustrates a lack of WA strategy adoption. (By “visible”, we exclude pure web server logfile-based solutions.)
It is possible that these companies base their site’s succes on the orders coming in. Hopefully revenue increases when you make some changes to your site, or when you send out a newsletter, but you can only base this conclusion on guesses.

Let me give you some examples of how far you can go with a web analytics tool, which also offers indepth ecommerce reports, and how you can further increase your revenue based on clear facts.

Talking about web analytics tools approriate for ecommerce sites I mean WebTrends Analytics, WebSideStory HBX, Omniture SiteCatalyst and CoreMetrics. This last one is not that known in Europe but is the analytics tool for many big ecommerce companies in the Sates.
In the list of BeCommerce winners and Labels, neither CoreMetrics, nor Omniture are present as used web analytics solution. WebTrends (Ryanair has a global contract with WebTrends) and WebSideStory are only used once!
Definitely strange though that international financial companies such as Fortis and Dexia are still using basic reporting. You should think that they would use a tool which could be integrated in a more business intelligence environment, where other channels are integrated as well. Although a lot of companies aren’t there yet.
So let me show you some examples of ecommerce reports integrated with site behavior:

• Scenario Analysis or Conversion Funnel
  This report is being used and to understand the conversions between each step. With Scenario Analysis you can analyze the level of abandonment from page to page within the scenario. Analyzing your whole scenario will give you conversion and abandonment rates. We also get an insight in where people entered the scenario from, and where they went to when they exited the scenario at that step.

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• Campaign drilldown with orders & revenue inluded
  This view shows where people entered the scenario from, and where they went to when they exited the scenario at that step, or abandoned the scenario.

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• Buyers vs. non-buyers
  You can combine product detail and visitor segmentation to provide merchandising managers with buyer activity for specific products

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There are plenty more, but I hope you can already see how indepth you can go. Ok, it takes some time to put the correct tags and configure the reports, but it’s worthwhile, and you have to think on the long term.
I you want more info, you know where to find us! 😉

Siegert Dierickx
siegert dot dierickx [at] webanalytics dot be

UPDATE 26/03/07: Following a comment we have reanalysed the Bikkembergs Football website and it is correctly taggued with Google Analytics.

web analytics

This entry was posted on March 23, 2007 at 7:24 am and is filed under Business Tips and Tricks, Events, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.