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'Tis the Season to Have Data
By Alexis Gutzman
October 25, 2000

By most accounts, the holiday shopping season begins on the Web a couple weeks before it begins at the mall. Many merchants may already have begun to see spikes in traffic and sales.

Most of what you need in order to prepare your site and your business for holiday shopping should already be done. Before you relax (ha!) and wait for the traffic to arrive, there may be one more thing you need to do and I suggest you do this now, before your IT staff gets too busy to talk to you. If you are the IT staff, sit down today with the marketing and merchandising departments.

Reporting Is Necessary
Reporting is a dull part of e-business, which is why so many e-businesses have operated for so long without any reports at all. However, in order to know which products are profitable and which products bring you high value (as opposed to bottom-feeder) customers, you need data.

There are two ways to extract the data you need in order to change your campaigns in mid-stream so that you capitalize on both the traffic and the buying proclivity associated with the leaves falling. The goal is to be able to pull data, at least daily (preferably in real time or hourly) from your server logs, from your customer database, and from your order-management system without slowing down your own servers, which will ideally already be handling the traffic from all your shoppers.

The first method is to design the reports you need and get someone in either your reporting group, if you have one, or IT to schedule the reports you need using a tool such as Crystal Reports. The second method is to contract with an ASP, for example WebTrends Live (on the low end) or Coremetrics (on the high end) to deliver timely relevant reports to you without the intervention of your busy, overburdened IT staff.

If you''ve been debating signing up with an ASP to get better access to the customer data that''s languishing on servers somewhere, out of your reach, then there''s no time like the shopping season to do it. Generally, all that''s required of your IT department is that they add a small snippet of code to each page (generally this can be done by adding it to a header that loads automatically on every page). The data logging doesn''t affect your servers, because the ASP is sent the data directly by the shopper''s browser -- unbeknownst to him. The ASP doesn''t usually want any personally identifiable information, just the kind of data that''s useful when aggregated.

What kinds of questions will this data answer? Questions you probably can''t answer easily today such as:

• Which email promotions are resulting in the most sales?
• What''s selling best?
• What''s selling best on weekdays, weekends, different times of day?
• Which referring sites are sending the most valuable traffic?
• What are people buying when they come from each referring site?

Without data, you can''t make intelligent decisions about how you should be marketing to both new and existing customers. Now''s the time to get your reporting ducks in a row.

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