We recently hosted a webinar on the topic of The Top Ten Benefits of Integrated Analytics and I was amazed and excited to see the number of questions coming in that showed people’s enthusiasm and embracing of this method.  We didn’t get a chance to answer all of the questions, so I thought I would provide some more details here.

Everyone wants better conversion and an improved ROI.  If I had a nickel every time someone promised that I would be off to a tropical island somewhere.   The promise is out there, but the problem is how do you get it in the most economical way (features, time and cost). Those three concepts are VERY important so keep them in mind.

Think about the barriers you may have experienced to successfully driving persuasive content or conversions to your call to actions (e.g., make a purchase or submit contact info).  I have heard everything from “we employ two full-time people to manage our analytics and I still don’t know what to do with it” to “can’t the system just do this for me” to “I don’t want to do this because it takes my IT department forever and costs an arm and a leg”.  Sound familiar?

Integrated analytics with content management or ecommerce can significantly help.  I won’t go too deep into it since you can follow the webinar presentation below, but from a high-level:

- Features: Integrated tools share information much better which makes helps you make your decisions based on more accurate, informative data. The interface is usually shared, which makes for an easier-to-use and more adopted system as well.

- Time: Integrated analytics usually takes care of the “page tagging” for you eliminating the the need for expensive resources spending inordinate amounts of time on creating and managing these tags.  There is no delay in taking action to change content or product information or user flow because you learn from analytics and then right there in the same UI you can do whatever you need.

- Cost: This is directly related to time.  You significantly reduce page tagging time/costs, reduce training and support costs since it is a common user interface and many times the overall pricing structure of integrated software can be very compelling.  You also have a single platform to manage which can be easier and less costly for IT.

The general themes of the questions from the webinar related to real-world examples.  So here are a few ways to think of integrated analytics in a scenario you may relate to:

1) E-commerce: A scenario would be tracking search engine keywords that brought a visitor to the site.  Easy enough for anyone.  Now track that to what they purchased to make a correlation between search engine effectiveness and transactions.  A little more difficult and time consuming but very doable.  Now track the margins of the products that were sold to really determine ROI on your SEO campaign.  Much more difficult without integrated e-commerce and analytics tools.  But that is your true ROI.  And how about driving certain merchandise to a customer who has bought before based on the manufacturer because they’ve shown an interest in their products.  Without integrated e-commerce, CMS and analytics to share behavior, content and product detail data that’s next to impossible.

2) Persuasive Content: A person is browsing your financial services site and looks at the Planning for Retirement page and then the Top Cities to Retire To.  You know a lot about that visitor — probable age, investment risk profile, etc.  Maybe folks approaching retirement age (> 50 years old) prefer personal contact vs. online forms.  Well swap out the “Contact Us” form for a large banner with a “Call Now” ad.  Reach the right audience with the right message.  Without integrated analytics and content management to track behavior and then dynamically render content based on that behavior it becomes next to impossible as well.

Now imagine both of the scenarios being managed by the content/business owner without IT intervention, without the cost or effort of page tagging and with an easier to use interface.

I understand people bringing up the argument about “best of breed” software and I have discussions on this all the time.  But remember the 3 principles mentioned above (features, time and cost).  Separate analytics typically requires significantly more upfront integration/development effort as well as ongoing maintenance, both of which translate into significant costs.  And as for features — just look at what you might need and don’t pay a penny more for bells and whistles that you won’t touch and just complicate the user interface.

So there you have it.  Integrated analytics makes everything better … I guess I have to put my own nickel in the retirement fund.