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http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3317821
By Kevin Newcomb February 25, 2004 If powerful search capabilities are a must for your e-commerce site and sophisticated Web analytics are a necessity for tracking visitor behavior, imagine the deep insight you'll gain when the two technologies come together. Add the flexibility of Web-based applications and the integration is as slick and it is seamless. A clear sign of this new level of sophistication appeared Tuesday when on-demand Web site search provider Atomz announced that it had developed deep integration with Web analytics provider WebSideStory. The result is that Atomz hosted search service and the HBX Web analytics service to provide you with a holistic view of your customers' behavior. When combined with Atomz Search, HBX, announced on Monday, is designed to deliver a new level of reporting on internal searches, including search terms across categories, relevant searches, failed searches, and search term conversions. "What people are doing on your Web site is important. Every time they type something into a search box, they're taking a survey," Steve Kusmer, Atomz CEO, told ASPnews. "Having that information not only in the search reporting capability for that search, but within the site-wide analytics capabilities of HBX, that's pretty exciting." Web analytics data and search term reporting typically have been stored in separate silos of information. By integrating search and analytics, searching and browsing information is correlated and available in a single interface. By acting on this information, Web marketers can experience increased revenue, traffic and decreased customer service costs, Kusmer said. "We have search term reporting, which tells you what people are doing on your Web site, and it's very powerful. You can look at what words and phrases are being searched for by day, week or month. But because we're handling the search and not the site-wide analytics, it's limited to a certain level of detail about what's going on with the site," he said. With HBX, a marketer can determine how a visitor came to his site, what keywords she searched for on the site, and whether the visit led to a conversion. This provides a better understanding of what visitors want to find, Kusmer said. A marketing partnership between the two ASPs began last year. At a WebSideStory user conference that Atomz was invited to attend, the two companies realized that about a fifth of the attendees were common customers. "What we then did was look into what we could do to help each other's company and our customer bases," he said. With HBX coming out, Atomz and WebSideStory worked together on integrating the two complementary products, including developing specifications of how internal search works, and making modifications to both companies' products so that they seamlessly integrate. "The integration of Web analytics and internal search is crucial to Web site operations," said Rand Schulman, chief marketing officer at WebSideStory. "By providing marketers with easy-to-read reports on all aspects of visitor interaction, including search terms, we are empowering our joint customers to improve site navigation and conversion rates." The fact that both companies are pure Net-native application service providers, built that way from the ground up, allows the two companies to see a lot of benefits from that, Kusmer said. "Things like being able to rapidly deploy features like we've done, which would have taken any other company more than a year to put together these kind of capabilities if they had to do it as an installed product," he said. Much of the excitement from customers has been among retail companies, who can immediately measure and substantiate the return on investment. "Because they can measure exactly what's going on with their site, it's easy for them to look at it and say 'that capability can really help my revenue soar'," Kusmer said. Media and entertainment companies use the service to help them attain their goal of customer retention, he said. "You want people to stay on your site, and come back for more. What's going on with your searches is just as crucial as what navigation they're clicking on." Industries that to do customer self-service on their site or support offline sales can see a benefit as well, he said. "Because HBX can integrate not only with Atomz, but all the way through to Salesforce.com, you can tell what's going on in your site in the context of where they came to your site, what they searched on using Atomz Search, all the way through Salesforce.com to measure what they've purchased." "If you're measuring anything, it's extremely useful not only to have the clickpaths that you get from HBX, it's also extremely important to know what people searched for. They're telling you, in their own words, why they're on your site. It's crucial information for whatever you're doing on your Web site," Kusmer said.
Article courtesy of ASPnews
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