Affiliates are capitalizing on the predictable behavioral patterns of consumers by using Web analytics tools to decode customers’ habits and boost revenue.

So if you’re a publisher and want to know who exactly is visiting your site, how different types of visitors come back, what they are looking for when they arrive and what specifically makes them want to leave, you should be thinking about tools that help you sort, analyze and understand your customers.

Web analytics is an emerging category of software that purports to answer all those questions and many more that could help you identify the steps for your site to reach the top of its game.

“Affiliates have tremendous opportunity,” says Barbara Poole, a revenue improvement consultant at PoolResources.com, “because they already understand what it is to drill down to the specific customer relationships.”

And if you find the right software to help with that decoding you’ll already be ahead of the curve.

That’s what Miami-based affiliate Pedro Sostre did. Through a collection of analytics software that includes AWStats, ClickTracks Pro and WebSideStory’s HitBox, he has determined the success of ad campaigns, discovered new opportunities based on analyzing what keyword terms are being searched and routinely improved overall performance for his sites including FreeBookClub.com, iTravelMagazine.com, AudioBookDeals.com and Tax-Stuff.com.

“We use Web analytics every day,” Sostre says. “When we found that 88 percent of that search engine traffic wasn’t converting, we where able to save $2,000 per month at FreeBookClub on pay-perclick advertising alone.”

These tools don’t cost much: AWStats is free, HitBox is $30 per month and Click- Tracks’ basic level is a one-time license of a few hundred dollars.

“Eliminating pay-per-click listings at Aha and Kanoodle alone saved me the cost of the software,” Sostre says. “And then there is the value you get from seeing what people are looking for as far as clicks and what campaigns are working. I absolutely could not do what I do without being able to analyze the sets.”

New analytics tools actually create a snapshot of who your ideal customers are and what makes them tick. And it even can determine the different types of customers your site might draw. Once you can do that, “you get the ability to really use that information,” says Brent Hieggelke, vice president of software analytics company WebTrends.

Merchants and affiliates are catching on to this power. The Web analytics market grew 13 percent in 2004, marking what global market researcher International Data Corp. calls a “second coming.”

Analytics has officially grown up from its beginnings a decade ago, when eyeballs and unique page impressions were all that mattered, or at least all that were measured. “Who really cares if someone is sitting on a page for 20 minutes? People have realized how dirty those metrics are,” says SAS Web Analytics’ Richard Foley. “Basic metrics just aren’t cutting it.”

So what is? There are several Web analytics advances, some still in beta, that could be huge for affiliates. Segmentation, intuitive analysis and 360-degree views are among the latest advances that have affiliates applauding.

“We just started using [analytics], and we’re just blown away by the power of seeing day-to-day metrics,” says Joe Beruta, director of interactive marketing for Jenny Craig, which gets anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of its online registrations through affiliates. “We used to look at the month after the fact, with no real-time metrics. Now we’re looking at things like clients versus non-clients as they come to the site – and we haven’t even gotten into segmentation.”

Segmentation

Segmentation is the hottest way to analyze customers on the Web, and at as little as $35 per month it’s finally affordable for small publishers. The technology records and visually tracks a single visitor’s interactions at every touch point. Assigning each visitor a unique identifier, it compares its findings with its growing database of other users’ patterns. Similar users are grouped into one segment. The more a visitor interacts with your site, either by clicking links or making purchases or answering questions about interests, the more data the technology collects on what makes that segment tick.

“It’s a little bit like taking a helicopter and flying over a freeway to see where the bottlenecks are,” says Michael Chavez, vice president of analytics maker ClickFox. “It’s not about predicting a user’s behavior; you’re looking at what they actually did. And you now can link that to actual demographics.”

One of the first companies to make segmentation accessible is WebTrends, which rolled out version 7.0 of its program a year ago. The latest version includes actual breakdowns of how profitable each link is and all of its segmentation tools. There’s a free 14-day trial at WebTrends.com.

Today “this broad, comprehensive picture of the process is one of the absolute hot spots in the market,” says WebTrend’s Hieggelke.

This type of analytics can even help you find new merchants or improve the deal you have. “You get to know based on buying habits what someone wants from your company,” says Mark Bradley, vice president of product shopping at shopping comparison engine NexTag. “If you know people are heading off to buy another product from a third party, then you negotiate with that merchant to get a special deal to sell it yourself.”

Intuitive Analysis

With intuitive analytics, you also get recommendations specific to respective goals for sales, IT, marketing and Web design. Now, if a certain segment of customers are spending three times more time on your site, but buying half as often, the software automatically searches for commonalities like coupon codes, free shipping offers or site navigation and tells you what about your site or where the customer came from influences their buying behavior. It tells you what to keep doing to get more customers (including determining the best advertising avenues) and what to start doing to get them to shop more often.

“That’s what analytics is,” says Stephen Messer, CEO of LinkShare, which in May launched its Synergy Analytics application for its network of affiliates. “It says: ‘Let us do the analysis that you would otherwise do on your own.'”

With basic analytics, you may conclude you bought the wrong keywords if your search engine results are down – with nothing in your reporting to tell you exactly what you did wrong. Intuitive analytics will point out six, nine, maybe 10 different things that might be affecting why search engine returns were low. It may be that your landing pages were too slow or down, it might be the time of day, it might be that you actually do have some keywords that aren’t effective. Intuitive analytics does a report for each and more of these things, providing an immediate blueprint for what steps you could take to improve search engine conversions.

360-Degree View

The third big analysis development builds its reports not only on your site’s Web data, but also on all of your other campaigns. Email, direct mail, traditional advertising, search engine placements and keyword buys are all cataloged online using distinctive links, coupon codes, SKU numbers, even unique telephone extensions. It integrates offline and other marketing and sales data for a complete view of your business activities and a complete read on what works and what doesn’t. It is, however, the most expensive of the Web analytics tools: SAS, which released its 360-degree SAS Web Analytics product in mid-2004.

“A 360-degree view can really determine what people are doing on yo
ur site, by digging through and mining the Web data so you can see ‘these are my specific segments,'” says Evan Shelby, product manager for SPSS’s Web analytics products.

SPSS bought NetGenesis several years ago and has integrated it with another SPSS product – Web Mining for Clementine – to offer a 360-degree view. Its SPSS for Windows 13.0 is $1,499 for a business customer and $599 for a single academic user. SPSS server licenses start at $15,500.

“We look at things like affinities, segments, what activities might be associated for cross-selling and upselling – really digging into the data,” Shelby says.

In the end, most site publishers use a combination of tools like Urchin and ClickTracks, says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, which concurrently manages hundreds of search engine marketing campaigns for clients like Virgin and Coldwell Banker. Other than high-end analytics like SAS, “there isn’t one package yet that we’ve found to truly meet the need to really be able to track all of these things at once,” Winfield says.

Analytics in Action

“It’s a very unusual combination of sophisticated technology and sophisticated math and analytics, when integrated together with merchandising and marketing communicating,” says Matt Moog, president and CEO of CoolSavings, an online direct marketing and media company.

Using analytics software from SAS, SPSS and Coremetrics, CoolSavings was one of the first to give online retailers a holistic view of customers that includes strategies for acquiring consumers, lowering churn and retaining consumers.

“It all starts in knowing what data to collect about the consumer, and storing that data – whether self-reported, behavioral or transactional data – in such a way that it can be used for those purposes,” Moog says.

It’s something Erick Barney, marketing manager for Medford, Ore.-based MotorcycleSuperstore.com, knows well. He added WebTrends 7.0 one year ago. “It’s amazing to see what kind of product you get from a company where that’s what they do,” Barney says. “It’s just leagues beyond what we had. We had all the basics. We knew where we stood, but we didn’t have the nitty-gritty. We didn’t know all the screws to tighten, all the design elements to tweak or all the things to do better – bidding on keywords or writing sales copy. Now, we dream up our metric and [our analytics provider] help[s] us put together the reports to analyze it.”

Using WebTrend’s overlay feature, which shows click-through and revenue numbers above the actual links on a screen capture of each page, Barney has been able to analyze everything from the placement of tables to clickthroughs on email communication links and automatically sees a red flag on those pages with frequent cart dropouts. Since adding WebTrends, MotorcyleSuperstore.com’s revenues have jumped nearly 50 percent.

“I’ve had access to most of the analytics from one source or another, but I had to log in to Overture, extract the numbers and build my own report to compare programs and make decisions,” Barney recalls. “This puts it all in front of you. I go ‘Campaign Drill Down’ and it’s all right there, and it’s really cool.”

On the other side of the coin are the affiliate sales that can be made on a product like this.

“Many of our partners use our technology to not only optimize their marketing efforts, but also complement their service offerings,” says Dan Shapero at NetApplications.com, which integrated Alexa Data Services into its Hitslink analytics tool in late-2003. Hitslink includes pay-per-click conversion tracking, click fraud analysis, referrers, search engine keywords and page navigation paths. It can track an Overture listing, for instance, all the way to orders and revenue, plus it sends out email traffic alerts when your traffic spikes. (There’s a free 30-day trial, good for up to 20,000 hits, at Hitslink.com/trial.)

Already taking statistics for a reported 40,000 publishers, most of Net Application’s customers come through its affiliate and private-label partner programs, Shapero says. “A big part of our vision is if we can enable these partners to use our technologies to market our products, they become our biggest evangelists.” Most of its 3,000 affiliates not only get 40 to 50 percent of every $9.95- to-start monthly hosting fee their users pay, but also get up to 50 percent off the price of using the software for themselves. (Hitslink now has $20 sign-up incentive.)

Meanwhile, Sostre is helping other sites master the analytics tactics he has learned as an in-the-trench affiliate. Using intuitive analytics reports, he helped one site change small things like the color of the button, where the sign-up is and what copy they put next to it. The results, reports a company spokesperson’s blog, were a 60 percent jump in EPC.

“These days,” reminds website strategy consultant Philippa Gamse, “you have to get into the behavior patterns – what you want to do better and what you want to stop doing – to be successful.” These new innovations in Web analytics, at a price range affordable to smaller sites, may be just what ROI ordered.

“The money there is real,” WebTrends’ Hieggelke says. “It’s the kind of thing that shows running your business by the numbers can absolutely have a fast payoff.”

JENNIFER D. MEACHAM‘s stories have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, AARP The Magazine and at CBSMarketWatch.com. She’s a former reporter for The Seattle Times.