Over the past decade, online businesses have grown from boutique online retailers to market players like Amazon and eBay. As online market share continues to grow relative to traditional retail, and as the online experience becomes a crucial part of all business planning, web analytics and analytics will come to the fore for track growth and revenue.
For website analytics, the standard that almost everyone uses is the free Google Analytics tool. By applying a few simple codes to your web pages, Google can track referrals, visitors, time on site, search keywords, page clicks, and many other valuable data. Almost everyone uses Google Analytics because it is good and quite comprehensive, and considering that it is free, it represents a great value. Google Analytics has a great system for reading referral traffic; And since Google is the pay-per-click standard, it’s easy to connect PPC campaigns and track their performance.
The challenge with Google, however, is the same challenge you face when using Salesforce.com. In most cases, once someone places an order, we have to switch to a different system to track that order. This same problem arises when working in an e-commerce environment and analytics are disconnected from the ordering system.
Some of the benefits of a NetSuite-based e-commerce system is that NetSuite can track most, if not all, of what Google Analytics tracks, including search keywords. For example, to match Google Keyword Conversion Tracking to NetSuite, define all the keywords you want to use in Google and then manage inventory in NetSuite which will generate unique campaign URLs that reference your landing pages. These URLs are then used as landing pages for keyword campaigns on Google. Once you do this, as people click on your PPC ads, NetSuite will track the information. Now that you have both NetSuite and Google Analytics tracking the same data, you can use both reporting systems to compare the results and get a complete perspective on the behavior of your website visitors.
NetSuite reports go beyond Google Analytics
NetSuite can also go further by distinguishing between a visitor and a customer. Because NetSuite is a CRM and ERP, the reports will have information about customers and their order history, and is capable of providing a more complete view of how a visitor and customer behaves on your site. Simply put, NetSuite offers more data, providing a more robust reporting structure.
Lead conversion is available because we are tracking speculative activity in the purchasing system, as well as orders received. From here, we can see the conversion rates; This is where Google can have a hard time crawling. Although there are ways that Google can do this, such as setting up parsing scripts on receipt pages and reporting the order and quantity to Google, based on experience, they are often inaccurate. NetSuite’s holistic system provides a more error-free environment for analyzing data and conversion metrics.
Simply put, when using web analytics on a NetSuite ecommerce site, you’ll want to code for both NetSuite and Google Analytics and compare the data. That way, you get the best of both worlds and have more comprehensive and detailed web reports.
Copyright © Marty Zigman 2011