By Ivan Chalif

The web analytics market is filled with many solutions, the Goliaths and Davids, each offering their own perspective on how marketers can improve their websites and squeeze more value out of their investments, both in the website and the marketing programs that feed it. But aside from different applications and product names, how different are they really? They all do the same thing; count site visitors and track what pages they visit. It's the digital equivalent of having someone with a hand-held click counter checking off the number of people who enter a store and noting where they go .

Certainly that is useful information. All site owners need to understand whether they have sufficient bandwidth to support the traffic volume, to learn what brings visitors to their site and to know which pages the visitor saw. This type of data gives them insight about what is happening on the site, which is perfect for measuring site performance. But how does that help the marketer understand the visitor? How does it help the marketer know not only what brings visitors to their site, but also what keeps them there (or keeps them coming back)? Unfortunately, it doesn't.

To overcome this limitation, Alterian's WebJourney proposes a new way of looking at visitor behavior on a website and understanding how site visitors interact, not only with pages, but ultimately with the content on the site. WebJourney provides marketers with the data they need to gain insights, not just about where visitors go on the site, but to understand what is important to them and how they engage with the content.

Web analytics vs. Behavioral analytics

The data that is collected by traditional web analytics tools is mostly count metrics. Web analytics is comprised of tracking and reporting on the details such as the total number of unique visitors, clicks and click-through rates, average time on pages and the site as a whole. Metrics like these are helpful for giving marketers information on how many people visit their site, which pages they go to, and how much time they spend.

By their nature, they are universal, but generic. It's easy to compare the metrics on one site (or one area of a site) to others. The goal of collecting these metrics is to detail site traffic, search engine optimization, and promotion performance. Armed with this data, marketers can make some assumptions about visitor behavior, but only at a very high level.

Behavioral analytics is a different way of looking at the visitor's activity on the site. Instead of the website being the focal point, behavioral analytics looks at the individual and their experience. This includes not only page flow through the site and time spent on pages, but down to the visitors' interactions with the content on the page, even if they don't click. With behavioral analytics, marketers can look forward and start to predict how site visitors will engage with the content rather than just having the historical perspective of web analytics tool metrics.

Asset-level tracking

One area where WebJourney differentiates itself is how it tracks the elements on the page, not just the page URL. This is especially important for marketers who want to evaluate and analyze what content is effective and what is not. Traditional web analytics tools try to solve this with features like A/B testing, but WebJourney lets marketers see exactly which creative assets on the page are getting the most attention.

WebJourney accomplishes this by capturing the on-page page events that happen in-between clicks. Which areas of the page did the site visitor move their cursor around? Did they see all of the content on the page, or just the part at the top? Did they copy and paste some content from the page? All of these provide details on what was of interest to the individual visitor, not just at the aggregate level. That type of data and insight is not something that you get from traditional web analytics tools. And the best part of this process is that WebJourney tracks the data automatically. A simple tag snippet on the page wires up all of the trackable elements all by itself. There's no need to spend extensive time and resources individually tagging each page.

Data Overlay

Another component of WebJourney that is typically not found in traditional web analytics tools is non-behavioral data. Measuring and analysing website behaviour is an important aspect of understanding how to improve the user experience and effectiveness of the website. Additional data related to location, corporate details, and in some locales, socio-economic data at the neighborhood level, can provide valuable insights about how the combination of behavioral and location information can be turned into new segments and give marketers insights they would not normally have with simple behavioral data.

Transition from anonymous to known

For marketers, having aggregate metrics for their site is all they thought they could get. But with WebJourney, they have the opportunity to not only identify individual visitors on the site (when the visitors give their permission), but also persist the behaviour data for them before they identify themselves. This assures the marketer that they have a complete picture of that visitor's behavior on the site, not just what they did after they identified themselves. In other words, Marketers can make their website more engaging for prospects and customers, as well as being able to combine the behavioral data with other data streams to uncover new and exciting segments of their audience.

About the author

Ivan Chalif is Director of Email Product Marketing at Alterian, an integrated marketing platform provider. Alterian works with marketing services partners, system integrators and agencies.