WebProNews

The almighty Googleplex can provide its webmasters good information with the company's analytics product, but Angel sees a lot of room for improvement. Semphonic president and CTO Gary Angel spoke with WebProNews about topics in the web analytics field. Like so many conversations in technology these days, the chat shifted to Google and its entrant into the analytics field.

The arrival of Google Analytics as a free product elicited a shrug from competing firms like WebTrends and ClickTracks. Angel noted how now, a couple of years later, it's not clear if Google really competes with firms like those.

Google can provide comparable information on some points. For enterprises, their ability to consider information beyond web traffic makes a difference, and necessitates the use of more in-depth solutions for analytics needs.

For Google, the utility of its analytics purchase and redeployment as a free service likely comes from the company's desires to expand the mindshare it has, as well as the information it can gain from visitor-website interactions.

Angel said businesses that aren't bringing existing business knowledge of customers to meet with web data limits what enterprises can accomplish. They don't think of business knowledge beyond research, he said.

One way enterprises could do better, and what seems to us the rationale for opting for a more industrial-strength solution in analytics, would be visitor segmentation. Knowing who converts on a website can enhance the marketing a business can perform.

"Think about what you know," Angel said, to summarize what a business needs to do with the details it already has, so they know where the value exists in their website traffic.

Where Angel sees the potential for greater personalization driven by analytics, he believes the value there will be tremendous. Being able to look at a visitor, determine their segment, and follow up their visit with a personalized email should be a boost to conversions.

In the industry, Angel has been impressed with the way WebTrends approaches visitor assessment. Through the use of a patented scoring module, the product can gauge the engagement of a visitor and determine who would be the best person to market a message to, based on their activity.

Tools have improved dramatically in analytics over the past three years, Angel said. These can help an entrepreneur be more dynamic in its customer relationships. The improvements to a firm's website as driven by measurable visitor activity presents a nice potential for better conversion activities.

It doesn't have to be driven through Google. For more sizable businesses with knowledge to tap, it may be the more robust analytics products that will enable them to enhance the conversions they reeive online today.