The Many Shades of CEM: Web Analytics

By Brian Strauss, Director of Sales Engineering —

In the first part of this series we took a look at why business impact analysis is such an important part of a CEM practice. Now we'll take a look at some of the different approaches to CEM and how they measure up in their business impact analysis capabilities.

I'll start with Web Analytics.

Web analytics is the stalwart of the web optimization landscape. Ecommerce platforms truly cannot live without it. In addition to being the system of record for the online business—measuring the performance of the business from funnel reporting to conversion rates—Web Analytics is also very helpful for managing search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), email campaign management and path analysis.

Yet when it comes to business impact analysis CEM-style, web analytics solutions get thin very quickly. Here's why:

• The data is presented only in aggregate. When looking at abandonments on the pricing page in the of the insurance binding process, for example, it can't say if the folks who abandoned just were not ready to transact, if they were confused by some form field validation, or if they tried 5 times but were stymied by an error. There is no ability to find out why these customers abandoned—no ability to discover the problem.


• The data available for analysis is limited to what you predicted you would need. Business impact analysis, on the other hand, relies on the ability to do fluid free form ad-hoc analysis. Or, to put it simply, you need to discover something you didn't plan for and conduct a business case on data that you didn't know you needed until just now.

In short, you may have lots of awareness (an abandonment trend, for example) that there is a business problem going on, but you will have limited ability to act on that awareness let alone conduct a business case on the reason why the problem is occurring.

Next up, we'll look at Robots and Voice of Customer solutions.

In the meantime, be sure to share any experiences you've had trying to do business impact analysis with Web Analytics solutions.