No one said matchmaking was easy. Here's the story of an unlikely match between web analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) as they move beyond flirtation to becoming engaged.
Traditionally, web analytics and BI play similar roles-- making enterprises more efficient. Both use data to monitor business performance and make intelligent decisions. Yet, up until the last few years, web analysts and BI professionals remained largely separated.
The old scenario
Web analysts were measuring website sessions and visitors but would often times not think of the real customers behind the clicks. It was almost as if site visitors were some kind of separate species made up of cookies, IP addresses and other intangible features. BI folks, on the other hand, would measure sales results but tune out the dialog that these customers negotiated via the website in leading up to the sale.
Part of the reason for the great divide was that web analytics used to be largely driven by IT rather than by marketing. And while they say opposites attract, marketing departments and IT departments of years past were only figuratively connected by the same company letterhead. In order for the match-making to work, common ground had to be established.
The times they are a changin'
Luckily those days are gone. Web analytics and BI have been flirting and now that they have found the customer to be the common ground, they have entered an engagement. Web analysts moved from the IT department and into a sunny duplex with marketing and BI professionals, transforming stale information on page-views and clicks into data focused on customer behavior and loyalty. Increasingly, web analytics reports are enhanced with customer data (demographics, transaction history, life-time value, multi-channel behavior) to make them more meaningful.
As in any strong relationship, BI also made some realizations and now understands that a significant portion of the customer interaction occurs online. Coupled with new research about purchasing pattern between online channels and brick-and-mortar shops -- (FACT: Google revealed that "63 percent of internet search-related purchases occur in offline retail stores") -- BI analysts have realized that online interaction with a company or brand can be the best window into the customer psyche and future buying behavior. As a result, companies are feeding selected attributes of customer online behavior directly into the data warehouses and into BI.
Relationship tips for web analytics and BI
Require free access to web analytics data to break down siloed systems that were traditionally in place in the past.
- A basic solution is to use a data feed, although they are not always the most reliable and require work for integration into the data warehouse.
- The most flexible solution for getting web analytics data and BI data together is to use an in-house web analytics system with an open database store so that the web analytics data can be openly allocated with the rest of the company's data warehouse.
Flash-forward: two kids and a mini-van?
As the drive for a single system of record increases, web analytics and BI will always be expected to intersect and form one customer data port. As technology continues to progress with integrated solutions, a "total" vision of the customer will become more readily available to further enable marketers to micro-target cross-channel campaigns. There will be an increased opportunity for automating action into insight and a decrease in response time for channeling customer data into successful marketing campaigns.
Akin Arikan is senior product manager for Unica Corporation, a leading global provider of Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) software. Read full bio.
