Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started (Part 2)
September 15th, 2008 by Doug Bright(Read the entire Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started series)
In part 1 of Customer Analytics: A Guide to Getting Started, we talked about defining the goal of your customer analytics initiative. We’re now going to spend some time over the next few days talking about planning. But first, I want to briefly give an example of why it’s critical to have a well defined goal and plan before deciding which type of tools you need.
Let’s say you’re the director of marketing and you recognize that customer analytics is a great cost-effective way to drive growth. You’ve read the whitepapers and made your case to the VP of Marketing or the CEO. The budget is allocated and you start contacting analytics vendors.
You see a few demos, a few sales guys drop by for presentations, and you make your decision. A few weeks later, the tools are installed and the big day has arrived. It’s time to go live. And here’s what you see:
Now what? There’s some interesting trivia here but if you’ve sold this investment to higher ups as something with fast ROI, trivia won’t be enough. You need to act on this data, but how?
As an aside, I know it seems like I’ve been ragging on Omniture lately but I’m not. Omniture is a phenominally powerful tool and can produce amazing results. The same is true for Coremetrics, Microstrategy’s customer analysis module, and others. But just becuase you have a Milwaukee drill doesn’t mean you can build furniture like Norm Abram.
If, however, you have the goal clearly defined and the right plan in place you’ll know exactly what to do with that report. And what you’ll find is that you probably only need 10% of the functionality included in your tool of choice. You may (gasp!) already have the tools you need!
Next time we’ll figure out how to get the right plan in place.
Read Part 3.
Tags: Customer Analytics, getting started
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