Review on the main features of today's modern Web Analytics
What is content personalization and behavioral analytics and how does it help me to get better conversions with my online business website? - This article reviews Personyze Web Analytics features that have been proven to give maximum flexibility and control over dynamic website content personalization and helping website owners to increase ROI and Converstion rate, by simply presenting their online visitors the content that they need and want to have.
Overview - Content Personalization Importance
Having the ability to personalize website content for your websites visitor can really affect your online business success (or failure). Most website owners don't really understand the importance of personalizing, optimizing and testing their online content, which is delivered for every visitor or prospect on their website. Content personalization has gotten a long way in web analytics product on the past year, and we see more and more solutions that gives a big emphasize on website content personalization with lots of behavioral targeting functionality. Reading about it is fine, but you need to take it to a ride in order to really understand the main strength in delivering specific and targeted content/ads to your online customers. It is all about increasing website conversion rate and getting to sell more products and services online. Many have tried it and know (for sure), that the reason that the have got higher conversion rate than before, its because the use of website content personalization functionality that can be found on some new web analytics solutions today.
So what are your options in terms of availability. The first easy-to-use (and Free) website content personalization and behavioral targeting tool is BT Buckets. As it names suggest, you will be creating buckets (aka Segments) with it. Upon those segments you will create specific custom HTML content that will replace or will add to the current content that can be found on your website/blog. It seems like this is the Heaven of Web Analytics. It might, but you need to know that there aren't any magic solutions and you need to know how to use those web analytics behavioral tools to the max, if you want to get the perfect results that you wish for. I like BTBuckets a a lot, and I think it is the first tool that you should try, and its free.A lot of website owners get lost with sophisticated and whats called "Professional Tools", but in that respect, I must give BTBuckets 5 stars for its easy-to-use interface and great integration with Google Analytics, Great job!
Personyze as the Ultimate Content Personalization Tool
I had a chance to be one of the first people to try Personyze web analytics. Announced in around July 2010 (as far as I remember) and in the beta stage right now, Personyze is a real-time web analytics SaaS solution, that has many features that will appeal almost every online businessmen or advertiser. First Personyze offers some unique behavioral targeting characteristics. That means that it has great tools for building behaviors (segments) and also has many features that allow many website analytics experts to further custom the segment itself. It is much more advanced and more flexible compared to Google Analytics and BTBuckets in that respect. Going on.. Personyze is quite a revolutionary website content personalization tool, which has many option to create actions (aka Actionable Analytics) like Banners, HTML content, Text replace, Custom CSS and many other options to further customize the actions for your needs.
Before I continue, here is a YouTube video (sorry no sound) that explains about the dynamic content personalization feature found on Personyze:
So I know that some of you don't understand what are actions and how they will work with your website, so here is a simple explanation about actions, action group and containers that will help you out.
Actions, Action Groups and Containers
Personyze utilizes Action Group, Actions, Zones (Placements). Let's start buy giving you a brief explanation about each one. The first one are Action Groups and Actions. Action groups are groups/containers that contain several individual actions (as we've told you earlier, actions can be banner popup, DIV popup, redirect, HTML content, Text replace, alerts, etc.). The main purpose of the action groups are to allow website owners to run several actions simultaneously for a specific user or group of users, which their behavior fits to the segment that we have attached to the Action Group. Furthermore, Action Groups can be attached to several segments (behaviors) at the same time. So for example, if a Visitor A comes from Google he gets to see Banner A (Action Group A1) and if a visitor comes from Yahoo search engine, he will get to see the same Banner A. The segment that we have used for it is "visitors that comes from both Yahoo and Google search engine" (segment/behavior). So as you can see, it is simple to understand, isn't it?
So now let's move to Containers. Zones/Containers or Placements, are pre-defined zoned that where chosen by the website owner/web analytics expert, to show a specific action. Not every action needs a container, but image action for example needs a container to exists in. without a container, the application won't know where to put the image into. So containers (zones) are placeholders for specific actions. But containers can serve more then just placeholders, they can listen to mouse clicks, mouse overs, copy content of the container and save it for later manipulation or data analyzing purposes. So which HTML content can serve as a container?
Almost any HTML tag with an ID can serve as a container. That can be DIV, Span, A and other tags. Of course you can't use FORM tag to use it as a container. I also want to add that there are some HTML tags that can use for data mining purposes. For example, you can use a TEXT INPUT field as a container and track text input, mouse clicks and other Javascript events, which that container supports. It is by far the most flexible and highly effective tool for not jut personalizing the content for each segment (behavior), but also utilizes advanced data mining capabilities to allow website owners to know of any problem. Whether it is a form filling problem, a problem with page loading and so on. So the flexibility is by far more advanced then what you get with "conventional" real-time web analytics SaaS or Software solutions from current vendors.
So why shouldn't I just buy WebTrends, Omnitue or Coremetrics web analytics solution. I have personally haven't tried the big three (so it is only my opinion and not a professional opinion with experience with those web analytics solution, keep that in mind) , but after reading the features list, I can tell you that Personyze does many of the things that the big three do (but for further information regarding your needs and comparison, please visit both vendors website to find out). Ther are some features that don't exist in Personyze but do exist in the big three, but theoretically, you can do anything with Personyze in terms of data mining, reporting and so on. But here is the SURPRISE, and its regarding the price. You have probably though that Personyze is an expensive solution as the big 3 (Omniture, Coremetrics and WebTrends), but NOT AT ALL, personyze is the most affordable "Permium" real-time behavioral targeting and web analytics tools. You pay less and get even more. Currently (7/27/2010) Personyze web analytics is in its beta stage, and I am sure that we will see plenty of new innovation from that company and many other unique designed tools that will works perfectly with the other modules.
So can it get better then this? - From my point of view and my research about web analytics solutions, this is probably one of the most powerful web analytical tool for tracking, analyzing, engaging, reporting and optimizing every piece of your website content for maximum ROI and conversions. It is so flexible, that even if you think that something is missing, you can create it yourself with all the special tools that Personyze offers to its customers.
Of the market of web analytics keep evolving every year, and we see more and more unique products emerging. So in order to stay up to date with the latest innovation, don't forget to visit Google News and search for Web Analytics news. There are more web analytics and behavioral targeting tools to come, I am sure about it. Again, just to let you know, Personyze is currently in beta stage as for the time writing this article.
Best Regards,
Idan.
