The Need for a Content to Customer About Face

Posted by: Pete Horadan

Last week, Matt reflected on how the changing business environment has made customer demand metrics derived from usage data mission critical. So I thought that I’d pick up where he left off in terms of what is missing from current web analytics.

Web Analytics one piece of the puzzle. Web analytics are an importance piece of the analytical puzzle. Through logfile, page tagging and click analytics technology, organizations can get a good understanding of the popularity of the content they are providing to their customers. Hits, Page Views, Visits, Sessions, Bounce Rate, Click-paths and % Exit all give insight into the product offering itself that helps organizations refine them.

For product managers, web analytics are like an automated, ongoing and real-time usability test for their product offering. They can sit behind the mirrored window and watch how the world navigates their site, see which pages are useful and which are not, and identify when users give up and go home. Web Analytics give product managers a critical measure of the popularity of the content that is provided, but Web Analytics, while critical to online businesses, only tell part of the story—providing providing information about the offering, but not about the customer himself.

Content to Customer About Face. Subscription analytics is the rest of that story. More like a marketing focus group than a product usability test, it answers the questions the marketing and sales team would ask such as:

  • Is this user from a large company or a small one? How many companies in the world are like this one? How does this segment of customers perform against my other segments?
  • What percentage of my customers is using my product? To what degree?
  • Are all of my customers users licensed? Is this customer at risk? Ripe for Up-Selling or Cross-Selling?
  • How active is this customer versus my other customers? Is this customer revenue and/or usage growing or shrinking? More than my other customers or less?
  • How does my opportunity in this company compare to opportunities at my other customers?

Subscription analytics utilizes usage data to provide new insight into the customer dependence for a product. It’s not about understanding the content; it’s all about understanding customer behavior.