Australia's Ultimate Marketing Technology Almanac Oct 2015 | Page 15

attribution and recommendations, especially for
commerce and anomaly detection. Adobe has
integrated predictive analytics into its Web analytics platform. IBM has some industry-leading
predictive capabilities in its SPSS platform,
but has yet to fully integrate them. However,
most Web analytic tools remain focused on historical, descriptive analytics on aggregated data
• Greater understanding. Replay vendors provide
session replay (with its deeper understanding
of how customers are interacting with your
website) than traditional Web analytic vendors
provide. Session replay also provides insight
into the customer experience
• Faster responses. Some offerings, including
Webtrends’ Streams, enable users to perform
virtual real-time Web analytics. This can be
useful, for example, in triggering an email
offer to a known user on an e-commerce site
who has just abandoned a shopping cart
• Friendlier integration. Some offerings enable
you to integrate with more data sources, such as
CRM data, customer profile data and data from
other channels.
Staff capabilities remains a serious issue and
impediment for many companies. Even when the
tools are available, users are often poorly trained.
And many tools still require technical skills in
things such as javascript, which also corrodes
over all usability for the typical end user.
While a tool like Google Analytics provides an
easy entry for web administrators the reality is for
many its just the starting point.
Eyal Mekler, managing director, Australia & New
Zealand at tag management company Tealium
says “not every tool works for every company.
Everyone is different. Publishers may want
deeper insight into reading behaviour and content
consumption,” he says.

“Airlines may want to dive into the nuances of
search. Retailers may care a lot about merchandising metrics. As a result, there are niche tools for
those verticals as well as more adhoc analytics
solutions that allow for unfettered exploration.”

intelligence and reporting over events that have
already happened AND machine learning and
predictive analytics, which deliver insights into
what drives the outcome of interest and how
organisations can improve their outcomes.

According to Mekler, it is likely that companies,
(particularly larger companies) will deploy a
range of web analytics solutions. (Tealium is a tag
management company whose stock in trade is to
make this easier.)

“The key to business success is to not only look at
metrics retroactively to analyse what happened,
but also to develop models to predict optimal
offerings for the future.”

“You can have your team use Google Analytics,
have your data scientist get a full data set delivered
into Hadoop and maybe a product team that wants
to use Tableau on top of Redshift. Whatever your
analytics stack, we believe that when you start with
a clean, universal customer data supply chain, your
teams work together to make better decisions for
the business, not just their silo.”

“Predictive analytics assist us in anticipating
customer behaviour. The customer behavior of
interest could be anything ranging from spend,
buying habits, page views, response to a certain
trigger or something else.”
From a business perspective, there could be
a variety of reasons why you would opt for predictive analytics strategies says Kolyshkina.

Sunil Menon, CTO and head of product management for HP TeamSite says “Marketers now
look to use analytics to derive actionable insights
from that data and feed it directly back into the
digital strategy in real time. This drives increases
in conversion, sales and retention rates. It’s
important that non-technical users can access
these insights from within the tools they use to
create and deliver campaigns and other multichannel experiences.

“Reporting-type web analytics tools generate
huge amounts of clickstream data and predictive
analytics helps filter out the noise and go beyond
aggregate level metrics. They help you understand the complex patterns between metrics and
these patterns can be used to form the basis of
decision making processes.”

“HP TeamSite and the HP Marketing Optimisation portfolio helps marketers leverage existing
customer data such as transactional history, geographic location, clickstream data, referral, time
of visit, etc. Marketers can personalise content
based on profiles, or have TeamSite automatically
prioritise content for different visitors.”

Whether Google Analytics is sufficient for a
website depends on the needs of the business who
owns the website says Kolyshkina.

According to Inna Kolyshkina, head of the South
Australian chapter of the Institute of Analytics Professionals of Australia (IAPA), it is
important to get terminology right: the word analytics is often used too broadly, covering business

Decisions need to be data-driven, not based on
guesses or hunches, she says.

“Google Analytics is about reporting and retrospective: it tells you what happened. However,
if your business is web-based, you want to be
proactive and understand how you can improve
your bottom line. To do that, you need predictive analytics.
So what kinds of insights can companies garner
from web analytics?

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