NetSuite and Google Analytics: How can you tell a customer from a visitor?
Over the past decade, online businesses have grown from online retail boutiques to market players like Amazon and eBay. As the online market share continues to grow relative to traditional retail, and as the online experience becomes a crucial part of all business planning, web analytics and analytics will move to the forefront for tracking of growth and revenue.
For website analytics, the standard that almost everyone uses is the free Google Analytics tool. By applying some simple code to your web pages, Google can track referrals, visitors, time on site, search keywords, page clicks, and many other valuable data. Most use Google Analytics because it’s good and fairly complete, and considering it’s free, it’s great value. Google Analytics has a great system for reading referral traffic; And since Google is the pay-per-click standard, it’s easy to connect PPC campaigns and track their performance.
The challenge with Google, however, is the same one-sided challenge when using Salesforce.com. In most cases, once someone places an order, we have to move to a different system to track that order. This same issue arises when working in an eCommerce environment and analytics are disconnected from the ordering system.
Some of the benefits of a NetSuite based e-commerce system is that NetSuite can track most, if not all, of what Google Analytics tracks, including search keywords. For example, to match Google Keyword Conversion Tracking to NetSuite, define all the keywords you want to use in Google and then manage inventory in NetSuite, which will generate unique campaign URLs that refer to your search pages. destination. These URLs are then used as landing pages for keyword campaigns on Google. Once you do this, as people click on the PPC ads, NetSuite will track the information. Now that you have NetSuite and Google Analytics tracking the same data, you can use both reporting systems to compare results and get a holistic view of your website visitor behavior.
NetSuite reporting goes beyond Google Analytics
NetSuite can also go further by being able to distinguish between a visitor and a customer. Because NetSuite is an integrated CRM Y ERP, the reports will have information about customers and their order history, and is able to give a more complete picture of how a visitor and customer behaves on your site. NetSuite simply offers more data, providing a more robust reporting structure.
Lead conversion is available because we are tracking speculative activity in the purchasing system as well as orders placed. From here, we can see the conversion rates – this is where Google can have a hard time keeping track. While there are ways Google can do this, such as setting up analytics scripts on receipt pages and informing Google of the order and quantity, in experience they are often inaccurate. NetSuite’s holistic system provides a more error-free environment for analyzing conversion data and metrics.
Simply put, when using web analytics on a NetSuite e-commerce site, you’ll want to code for both NetSuite and Google Analytics, and compare the data. That way, you’ll get the best of both worlds and have more comprehensive and insightful web reports.
Copyright © Marty Zigman 2011