_ It is now just under 2 weeks since the new www.richardwilding.info website has been launched.  As part of the process the freely available Google Analytics has been used to monitor the site.  Information including the number of hits, detailed demographics including the town, country, type of computer, make of mobile telephone, time spent viewing pages, entry and exit pages are monitored and analysed automatically as part of the free google analytics package. 

Google analytics also tracks the “journey” or flow a user takes on the website.  It sees the country and town the “surfer” originates from it then monitors each page viewed so a surfer may originate in Seatle, USA, access the home page for 30 seconds, then spend 2 minutes on the “About” page, 45 seconds reading this “blog”, then access the “downloads” and down load a file, then visit the “podcast page” for a further 92 seconds and then exits.

But what is the point of this abundance of this anonymous information and how can companies use it?

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I recently was discussing this with the Supply Chain Director of a major U.K. retailer.  His Information team uses Google analytics to monitor how customers surf.  Within their site customers log in voluntarily so now they know precisely who the person is.  One category that was not performing well was clothing and particularly ladies clothing.  They noticed many customers would access the site surf and put items of clothing in the “basket” only to delete them at a later stage.  This prompted them to recognise seemingly lost sales.  But why was this?

They then employed a team of customer service representatives to call customers.  They basically said “We notice you have been looking at cloths on the website and you placed them in the basket but did not purchase, was there a particular reason why you did not buy?  Can we give you a discount”  A big revelation from this was many of the younger more fashion conscious customers would actually look at cloths on the Wednesday for an event they would be going to on Friday or Saturday.  The current delivery lead-time was too long to assure the delivery arriving so the internet “basket” was deleted once the delivery lead time was quoted.  They then found the supply chain had two distinct weekly cycles.  Monday to Wednesday returns would arrive and Thursday Friday and Saturday items were delivered.   The Supply Chain operations were therefore reconfigured to accommodate this, enabling fast next day delivery at the end of the week  being made available.  This has now enabled the customer to buy the clothing on the Wednesday or Thursday and have it available to attend the special event at the weekend.  

So what was the result, increased sales, better customer service and unbelievably lower costs for the overall supply chain!

So a freely available website monitoring system has generated information that the marketing and supply chain teams have used to re-design the supply chain.

With this website however,  I don’t know who you are although I do know where you may originate from, but please do tell me what you like and what you don’t like about this site it would be great to get more hits