In my experience in working with our customers at ATG, we often hear how Web analytics solutions are great providing an overall “health check” for the online sales channel. How is traffic today? Where is it coming from? What’s the overall conversion rate? What’s the average transaction value? Where is traffic converting the highest? What’s my bounce rate on this page?

A recent Web analytics survey published by eMarketer highlights that, in some respects, online sellers are frustrated with understanding and using Web analytics tools. Three of these particular data points caught my eye:

1)    Integration with other marketing solutions” (46 percent)

2)    “Drilling into the data” (42 percent)

3)    “Marketing attribution issues” (32 percent)

These three challenges – to me – are indicative of a growing trend in the e-commerce market: the difficulty in using Web analytics to measure “cause and effect” in the online customer experience. In other words, Web analytics tools alone may not give marketers all the data they need to determine what is causing their KPIs – such as conversion rates or abandonment rates – to dip or rise, as well as how specific campaigns and optimization strategies affect those KPIs.

So what’s the answer? More and more, customers are looking to supplement Web analytics with actionable analytics offered by other solutions – such as their e-commerce platform or Web site optimization tools – to help them quickly identify the causes of online problems (or opportunities), implement site changes, and measure the effect of those changes. These actionable analytics and reporting tools – integrated directly into the tools that online marketers and sellers use every day – help color in the “big picture” of Web analytics. They give business users the 360-degree customer view they need to make informed decisions and measure the impact of those decisions to make sure they are moving the needle in the right direction.

If sounds like a lot of theory, here are a couple tangible examples. A large US airline uses our ATG eStara Click to Call product to optimize its online booking experience. Using built-in analytics and reports, the customer noticed a large volume of calls coming from a particular point in the online booking process – well above the normal call volume. They quickly deployed a custom survey for these callers to find out why they were calling, and played back a number of the conversations to determine if a single cause might have been behind the spike in call volume.

As it turns out, a particular page in the bookings process omitted seating assignments. Consumers, hesitant to click the “back” button for fear of losing their transaction, were using Click to Call to get their seat assignment before moving forward. The airline enhanced that part of the booking process by adding the seat assignment to the page in question, and noticed a near-immediate reduction in call volume and increase in online conversion rates. By utilizing actionable analytics – integrated with its live help solution – the airline was able to improve the customer experience, reduce abandonment, and reduce the demands on its call center.

Let’s take another example, this time in the online retail world. More and more merchants are using automated recommendations services to optimize interactions by showing more personalized recommendations to each visitor. One of our customers noticed, with the help of integrated merchandising analytics, that visitors who clicked on recommendations in the same brand were converting much more often than those who clicked on recommendations for other product brands.

The retailer theorized that its brand loyal customers were more enticed by “in-brand” recommendations. They quickly added an “in-brand” refinement rule to all product pages so that recommendations would be personalized but limited to the same brand as the product shown. After a few weeks, the customer noticed a lift in conversion rates for shoppers clicking on recommended items. Cause and effect.

This post certainly isn’t meant to de-value Web analytics solutions – they absolutely have their place in the online marketing and selling tool set. But as businesses look to truly optimize the online customer experience, they should use actionable analytics from their e-commerce solutions and Web site optimization services to dig a few layers deeper to get to the actionable data and more effectively attribute results to the key decisions they make each day.