Gathering Online Marketing Intelligence

Marketeers are realising that websites can provide a wealth of invaluable information about existing and potential customers' attitudes, perceptions, and needs. The question is simple: how can you get this information, and can it be trusted?

Marketeers need information about customers. For example, how do customers think, feel, and respond when confronted by the products and services that you are seeking to promote? What messages will direct people towards your products rather than your competitor's and, most importantly, what triggers will spur them into action?

Let's explore together the virtues and vices of a range of the most effective ways to get genuinely useful information on your web visitors, their attitudes, and aspirations.

The Web Survey
The most obvious route to gathering marketing information is the web survey.

Enabled by the advent of web programming and online databases, the web survey seems to hold the most direct route to valuable customer data. You can determine the questions, prescribe acceptable answers, and even provide the resulting data in a format which can be easily manipulated to give you the information you need.

Yet the problems that trouble traditional offline surveys also impact online surveys - but in a more acute form.

First, how do you get your visitors to complete the survey in the first instance? The web is the self-service medium par excellence - if folks don't want to participate they don't have to, and, worst still, they may be prompted to leave your site if they feel they are being asked to do something they don't want to.

The answer is, it seems, is incentivisation - give them something in return for their time. Yet, even this has its problems. Provide an incentive that has a broad appeal and you may get the greatest percentage of your target audience participating, but you also risk gathering in the "freebie prize" junkies who crawl the internet hunting for free competitions and prizes. Not good. They are not your audience and without safeguards against multiple submissions, your data could be rendered little better than worthless.

Of course, the opposite is also true, choose an incentive that is too specific and your interlocutors may become too narrowly defined and non-representative.

So, despite the obvious benefits of a web survey in terms of the total control over the questions and proscribed answers, the net does provide a few perils to the unwary marketeer who dares to tread this path.

Online Polls
Online polls are the next device in the marketeers armoury, so let's see how they fair. Because they are simpler - often a single yes/no question - they do not offer the flexibility of a full-blooded survey. You might be able to change a poll once a day at most, and this leads to painfully slow information release compared to the web survey route.

Yet, the simplicity and directness of the poll is also a virtue because the "doorstep" into participation is so much lower. Unlike web surveys, the prime focus of the poll participant is not on an incentive but on the subject itself. To be sure, those who are exercised by the subject matter will respond, but so too will those have a vague interest - participation is just a click away.

But what if you want to find out about the views of all your visitors, not just a self-selecting few?

Web Stats
The most obvious resource available to the marketeer is to examine what visitors actually do on the website. Which directories, pages, and paths are most used? What can we infer about these online interactions? Is the visitor seeking information, and if so, information of what sort? Is the visitor seeking interaction, and how is that satisfied? What information is ignored or underused by visitors?

In my experience, many marketeers ignore these types of questions, and fail to make the most of interactions as a source of valuable customer data. I suspect that it is because the web is still a relatively new medium and marketeers are still getting to grips with it - having been trained in largely offline marketing and research techniques.

Interrogative Link Tracking
There is more to say about web stats and their ability to unlock the mind of the web visitor, but let's move on to look at one technique which sits as a "middle way" between surveys/polls and the raw web stats - that is, interrogative link tracking.

Modern web monitoring tolls - such as AgoraEye, our proprietary online monitoring tool - can track very low level interactions, even down to monitoring the clicking of a single link.

What this means is that, should the savvy marketing produce a navigation scheme which offers the visitor a choice between two or more alternatives within the narrative of the visitor path, then the discriminating monitoring tool can flag up this difference.

The obvious advantage of interrogative link tracking is that it provides the visitor with a seemingly natural, uncomplicated choice. The visitor believes they are merely finding the next page, but the marketeer is discovering, for example, that 30% of the visitors who came in under search term A, are seeking information Z and are technicians - all of which can be gathered by a judicious use of link-based interrogations.

It is an art to craft these interrogations, but once they are in place, all visitors to a page will make the choices presented without requiring any further incentivisation other than to find the next page.

Conclusion
To conclude, there are a number of different mechanisms for gathering customer intelligence - many more than discussed here - each with their own strengths and weaknesses, levels of directness, and so on. Which to use depends upon your particular requirements, however, the customer data these methods yields is invaluable so long as it is used judiciously and with due regard to the potential pitfalls it contains, but it is fair to say that the marketeer no longer has any excuse not to seek to discover the gems it contains.

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