Actions have consequences! That's exactly a Marketing Executive is hoping for when they are asking for a budget to do their marketing and sales promotional effort! They are hoping that their marketing and promotional efforts have a consequence of closing a sale with you.
Many e-commerce websites or content web sites rely upon leveraging the browsing behavior of visitors to drive sales or ad revenues. But how do you get that data and play around with different scenarios?
Traditional Business Intelligence efforts have concentrated on building humungous data warehouses and stuffing all kinds of data in it, hoping that one day, they can all be sliced and diced for valuable insights!
Except that there is a temporal dimension to this and that cannot be ignored. What you do today on a web site or what you buy at the store today has a consequence for someone who is hoping to close a sale with you on other things.
Which visitors are likely to buy after they have been through a SPECIFIC web page?
What kinds of visitors are the last minute shoppers during the Christmas season? What kinds of promotional offers work with them? How can the lessons we learned last season be applied this time so that we can push that Upsell and Cross-sell efforts to yield more sales?
What kinds of Business to Business (B2B) Visitors are likely to download a white paper from our site? What were the patterns of interaction after they did download the white paper? When they did they get back to us with further queries?
I came across Quantivo, a very interesting SaaS offering with some very cool on-demand Behavioral Business Intelligence you can use.
Here is a 20 minute demo of what it can do, especially in tying Web Analytics to your Content site or E-Commerce site economics:
From Web Analytics Data to Decisions in 20 Minutes from Quantivo on Vimeo.
The real power of tools like Quantivo is in their interactivity and on-demand analytical capability you can put in the hands of users.
Reality is that users really don't know ahead of time what kinds of analyses they may need or on a hunch they want to try something. It is very frustrating for them to take a number and stand in line for the IT Gods to smile upon them, run their query, and give them their results. This may take hours, even days and weeks!
If Business Intelligence wants to be relevant in an age where lots of data is gathered already, but not enough flexibility exists in their analysis and use, they will have to put the power in the hands of the users - Primraily Marketing and Sales people in the company.
Very interesting solution indeed! Another frontier in Business Intelligence!
For many people, one of the most frustrating aspects of life is not being able to understand other people's behavior. - Anonymous
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