I will post more about this later in terms of my key take aways overall. But for now, thanks so much to Rene and Aurelie for their interesting event Web Analytics day and their hospitality. Here are some take aways from the event.

Ian Thomas from Microsoft showed us some slides from Gatineau which will be launching in a couple of weeks. Click here if you would like to sign for Microsoft’s beta invite request.

The key USP of gatineau is the ability to segment your visitors by age and sex demographic from Live passport holders who visit your site (there are 30 million live passport holders so for your website this is likely to be a statistically significant segment). This demographic data is apparently completely anonymous. Plus some nice zooming in. As to whether this become a significant player in the market, like Google analytics, only time will tell. I do have some nice photos of the screen shots but will have to put those up later.

Actual web analytics client casestudies - I always think that actual results from actual clients are the meat on the bone, for example Eric Petersen’s presentation, Web Analytics is hard.

1. Top online retailer improved site design as a result of web analytics and multi-variate testing.
Analyst finds that visitors using site search are better customers.
Analyst recommend improving visibility of internal site search.
Controlled testing of different visibility and position of internal search within site
One successful experiment returns a 2% increase in visitors using site search.
Result: a six figure lift in weekly revenue, equal to a nearly 1% increaase in total company revenue over a year.

2. A well known brand analysed website to isolate a specific group of users on the web site.
Analyst shows that “product compare” functionality is under utilised.
Visitor segmentation is used to isolate visitors using “product compare” functionality.
Analyst discovers this segment has a 33% higher average order value.
Changes made bsaed on this analysis increase traffic to “compare product” functionality by 11%, increase purchases by 16% and reduce exits from these pages by 56%.
Result: an annual increase in revenue of $2.2 million

3. A Fortune 500 travel company used web analytics too and made millions by improving their messaging.
Analyst speculates that prospects were not seeing “best price guarantee” information.
Concerns were confounded by multiple messages and placements throughout site.
Multi-variate testing was used to test different messages and treatments.
The winning format was shown to convert at a rate of 0.6 points better than the control.
Result: an estimated life in online bookings of $30 million annually.

Sometimes in web analytics, we get far too concerned with which tool should we use, which theory or thought leader are we following. Ultimately, we are in the business of making more money for our clients or our own website, be that in increased sales or increase lead generation - which is why I gain so much from hearing exactly how and why people are getting the results they are for their websites.

Thanks for reading and please do comment if you have thoughts for web analytics princess