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There is an increasing amount of data that can be easily gathered about each and every interaction you have with your clients as well as an increasing amount of publicly available information that can be mapped against your information about your clients. This is being complemented with an increasingly robust set of tools to help you understand and react to the data in near real time. This is known broadly now as "big data". For example, Bloomberg collects 100 data points on every page view and uses these to feed their near real time recommendation application. Telcos capture location information as part of their billing applications on almost a minute by minute basis. Every nuance of conversations in a contact center can be captured and then analyzed in a broad range of ways.

What are you doing today with analytics that's giving you a competitive advantage in improving your interactions with your clients and improving the value that you're delivering to them?

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Some thing that are helping us:

  1. We use MouseFlow to analyze how people use our site - in particular to find out things that Google Analytics would miss - like when they click on unlinked images, expecting them to do something

  2. We monitor the IP addresses that people use to access our software, and if they come in from multiple IPs from what appear to be different geographical locations, we'll recommend using our mobile app as well.

  3. We log object creation, modification and deletion - if we see patterns that look like someone trying to create and re-create something, we'll suggest documentation resources.

  4. We automatically build profiles of our customers, based on the features the use the most frequently, and email them to recommend other features they may like (e.g. if they are posting jobs, we'll email them to let them know about our customer job-board features).

  5. We sort our activity logs, to do cohort studies on activity - e.g. looking at the behaviour of people that signed up 3 months ago, vs those that signed up 2 months ago or 1 month ago, let us compare how well a feature is being adopted.

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Wow, never heard of MouseFlow, looks really cool! – Davy8 Mar 27 '11 at 13:14
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has #2 really proved to be worth the development effort? After all, any of your users may be benefited by your mobile offering. – Kenneth Vogt Mar 27 '11 at 21:36
@Kenneth yes we think so - we do have a prominent link to our mobile version that's available to all users, but this particular recommendation is part of a larger system of hints/tips that we push out to users based on their behavior. Different actions/usage trigger different tips - this was just one of them. – Joseph Fung Mar 31 '11 at 17:49
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In general, analytics does not give you too much knowledge about your market. Analytics is more to help you understand how users are using your site.

To understand how users are using your site, first of all you have to have goals like: - Make accounts - recommend to friends - User feature x

Then you can use analytics to get a sense of how many people click on "feature x" link vs. how many do not. That is more what analytics is for. Then once you make changes to how your site works, you can use analytics to compare results of previous conversion rate to current.

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