Over the past decade, online businesses have grown from online retail boutiques 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 forefront for tracking of 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. Most use Google Analytics because it’s good and pretty comprehensive, and considering it’s free, it’s a great value. Google Analytics has a great system for reading referral traffic; And considering that 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 one-sided challenge when using Salesforce.com. In most cases, once someone places an order, we have to go to a different system to track that order. This same issue arises when working in an eCommerce environment and analytics are disconnected from the ordering system.
Some of the benefits of a NetSuite-based eCommerce 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 with NetSuite, define all the keywords you want to use in Google, and then manage inventory in NetSuite, which will generate unique campaign URLs that refer to your search pages. destination. 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 NetSuite and Google Analytics track the same data, you can use both reporting systems to compare results and gain a holistic view of your website’s visitor behavior.
NetSuite reports go beyond Google Analytics
NetSuite can also go further because it can distinguish between a visitor and a customer. Because NetSuite is an integrated crms and ERP, the reports will have information about customers and their order history, and is capable of giving a more complete view of how a visitor and customer behaves on your site. Quite simply, NetSuite offers more data, providing a more robust reporting structure.
Lead conversion is available because we are tracking speculative activity in the shopping system as well as orders placed. From here, we can see the conversion rates – this is where Google may have a hard time keeping track. Although there are ways that Google can do this, such as setting up analytics scripts on receipt pages and reporting the order and quantity to Google, in experience these are often inaccurate. NetSuite’s holistic system provides a more error-free environment for analyzing data and conversion metrics.
In a nutshell, 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 complete and insightful web reports.
Copyright © Marty Zigman 2011
