Use your own website as a source of knowledge

Thursday, March 19, 2009

The contemporary corporate website is a frequently underused source of business intelligence. The more content and functionality a website has, the more knowledge there is to gain from it. Therefore, the opportunities today are greater than ever.

Every single online interaction is a signal about the minds of investors, customers, employees, suppliers, government agents or other important target groups. On its own, it tells us nothing, but if we follow everything that visitors do on a website over time, we can gather important insights. A clear change to a seemingly small detail may be an early warning about changes to the corporation’s environment.

Analysis of already available intelligence data

The obvious communications purpose of the corporation’s website or websites should therefore be supplemented by a business-intelligence purpose. In principle, no changes are needed to the content or user interface. Rather, it is a matter of implementing sufficient measurement and good reporting.

Real-world examples of using web analytics for business intelligence and trend detection:

• Have new search terms appeared among the 50 most common?
• Which infrequently visited pages have suddenly received many more visits than usual?
• Have identifiable banks and financial analysts visited the website more often than usual?
• Has the list of most commonly viewed financial information changed?
• Which pages get visits from major customers and competitors?
• Does the website of any subsidiary exhibit a changed visit pattern?
• Has the number of visits from specific countries increased markedly?

Customised and automatic reporting

The challenge is to find the proper metrics for each corporation and to create customised solutions for automatic reporting and signaling of conspicuous changes, so that the risk of losing valuable intelligence due to lack of time for manual processing is kept to a minimum.

For particularly busy websites or turbulent industries, it may be suitable to analyse the web usage once every week.  Otherwise, it is usually advisable to employ monthly reporting for business intelligence through corporate websites.

In practice, it is useful to build the solution on top of one of the established tools for web statistics and analysis of user behaviour. These tools, however, tend to be created primarily for websites that generate direct revenue through sales of products and services or display of advertisements. Therefore, we need to adapt the way we use the tools to the needs of typical corporate websites.

New possibilities with a new mindset

In the long run, it may be possible to actively listen for trend signals by publishing texts on a wide range of subjects, based on pure guesses about what might become hot within the industry in question. Thanks to Google and other search engines, texts like that will quickly be indexed and available to anyone who is searching for information. The texts will act as baits, waiting to be found by corporate stakeholders with a newly awakened interest in a particular topic.

If or when any of the guessed trends become reality, an increase in the number of visits to specific pages will alert the publisher about the fact. The situation can be analysed further by studying what search terms in Google—or the corporation’s own search engine—draw m0st visitors to the pages.

If the aim of collecting knowledge becomes part of the mindset when evolving the content of corporate websites, there are endless creative approaches. Particularly in uncertain times, every opportunity of gathering business intelligence should be taken.

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