Using Your Analytics to Better Understand Shopping Habits
Being able to analyze traffic is critical for any website owner, especially those involved in e-commerce. While most online retailers have the ability and capacity to capture information about their customers, simply storing this data is not enough. In fact, the actual data isn’t nearly as important as how you put it to use.
Knowing how to utilize the data you collect could be a valuable asset that drastically boosts your profits. This provides you with an opportunity to learn more about your customers and most importantly, their shopping habits. There are many tools and solutions on the market that will help you easily analyze shopping patterns and determine the type of promotional tactics most likely to both increase the size of purchases and entice customers to buy certain items.
One such solution is Quantivo Retail, a product designed by behavioral analytics software vendor Quantivo. This sophisticated query tool can easily be installed on an online merchant’s back-end system. Once the software is running on the server, it gathers all the information from your POS hardware and merges those details with the customer demographic data stored in your files. This information is then transmitted to Quantivo, who within five business days, returns comprehensive analysis and recommendations to help you better market and sell your products.
“With the current analytical solutions in the market, retailers have to make a huge investment in the hardware and software and it takes a Ph.D. to write the programs,” says Brian Kelly, Quantivo CEO. “We can get practical and useful information into the hands of the marketing managers.”
With Quantivo Retail, online merchants have the flexibility to update their purchase data on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. They also have the luxury to compare the performance of promotions during various times of the day, and analyze sales performance by criteria such as age, gender or region.
Another rapidly adopted analytics service is provided by specialist SAS. Its analytics solution delivers a fully integrated environment for data mining, forecasting, predictive and descriptive modeling, simulation, optimization and more. A direct beneficiary of the SAS analytic solution is Parkson Corporation, one of the largest retail chains in Malaysia. “The SAS model provides us with a much more comprehensive and systematic way of analyzing the data we have,” says Lee Kong Huat, general manager of Parkson’s Management system. “It points out methods to increase our mailer response rates and the efficiency of our routine campaigns — with the same budget.”
SAS employs a broad range of methods and processes to gather, categorize, analyze and interpret customer information. It uncovers patterns, essential variables and key relationships to deliver insight in a fast and efficient manner. The company’s analytics solution can be seamlessly integrated with business departments across numerous industries.
More Affordable Alternatives
Though incredibly effective, tools and solutions offered by vendors such as Quantivo and SAS don’t come cheap. In fact, it is very possible that the performance of your business does not justify the power and price tag of these offerings. Thankfully, there are a few viable alternatives that will not cost you nearly as much and could turn out to be just as effective. Two helpful utilities are AwStats and Webalizer. These tools are very user-friendly and provide you with comprehensive details of your traffic statistics in the form of easy-to-read charts and graphs. You can find out how many visitors are coming to your site, where they are coming from, how long they stay, what pages they access the most and much more. Both AwStats and Webalizer are absolutely free to use and come included in many of today’s web hosting packages. While they will make you work a little harder, such tools are solid proof that you don’t have to be a large corporation to accurately gauge customer data and analyze purchasing habits.
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