Quantitative
Estimate of Tangible Benefits
Tangible value of Google
Analytics can be derived from optimizing it features. BT Financial Corp is
superannuation, investment, and insurance products company in Sydney,
Australia. BT used GA to conduct conversion optimization tests to increase
conversion rates for its online application form (Google Analytics, 2013).
These tests led to minor changes in the website that resulted in 12.5% more
visitors clicking through to the application form. The end result was a 61.7%
increase in conversions (Google Analytics, 2013). Another company, InsureandGo,
based in the UK saw added value to its company by using GA’s Tag Manager to
gain insights with conversion rates, funnels, customer behavior, and page
optimizations (Google Analytics, 2013). Adding one code to each page of its
website increased customer touchpoints threefold. The final result was a 5%
increase in total ecommerce rate and transactions (Google Analytics, 2013).
Trygg-Hansa, a Swedish insurance company, is another example of a company that
experience significant direct benefit from GA (Google Analytics, 2013). Through
analysis of data, GA demonstrated only 27% of visitors to Trygg-Hansa’s landing
page entered the funnel. The company implemented A/B testing to create new
features on the landing page. The changes increased the conversion funnel by
15.1% (Google Analytics, 2013). The url at the end of the entry explains how to
use the Tag Manager feature and its benefits.
IVK could also realize
tangible value from GA in a similar manner. IVK reported the following
statistics about its customers for the last fiscal year: 2.2+ million customer
inquiries; 530,000+ applications processed; and 180,000 loans funded (Austin,
Nolan & O’Donnell, 2009, p. 19). It will be assumed half of these customer
interactions occurred through its website. Using the data from the case studies
above, benefit to IVK from implementing GA can be estimated. If IVK used GA
data to make improvements to its website and gained 12.5% more visitors
clicking through to a loan application, over 33,000 more applications could be
processed ((265,000*1.125)-265,000). If IVK landing page improvements could lead
to the 15.1% increased conversion funnel as demonstrated by Trygg-Hansa,
approximately 166,000 more potential customers could find their way through the
funnel ((1,100,000*1.151)-1,100,000). Additionally, by tagging website pages,
IVK could have the potential to increase its transactions by 5%, which equates
approximately 4,500 more loans funded ((90,000*1.05)-90,000). Any of these
improvements would add to the profitability of the IVK and gain market share.
Qualitative
Estimate of Intangible Benefits
Based on the assumption that
IVK is seeking to increase market capitalization of loan sales, one of IVK’s
main intangible benefits is the increased confidence and direction in decision
making ability. Per Moore, Google Analytics provides a window into the operations
which is metaphorically similar to how a doctor can use medical machines to see
inside of a human body (Moore, 2015). The data found can show a marketer
exactly what their potential online customer is doing or not doing. This
knowledge allows marketers to make changes to correct or support their findings
in order to generate revenue, similar to how a doctor can see a problem and
provide a diagnosis. Marketers can evidence the accuracy of their decision
based on the before and after data in relation to how revenue changes. Such
information would be utilized by IVK to research the accuracy of marketing
efforts in online loan sales and the changes in revenue as a result.
Another intangible benefit of
Google Analytics is the ability for marketers to breach new or strengthen
current audiences (DeMers, 2014). Google Analytics also provides the intangible
benefit of allowing organization to expand or better attract customers through
customizable market segmentation tools. GA can run tools to distinguish exactly
the age, gender, language, location, technology used to access your site,
traffic sources and user behavior (DeMer, 2014). This provides organizations
with the ability to know who their online traffic is and if these users are the
target audiences they need for their goals. For example, say IVK finds through
market research that a region of college or universities is decreasing or
stabilizing tuition prices in relation to competing school. This relative price
difference would increase the students wishing to attend a school for higher
learning and IVK could utilize the opportunity to sell more loans in this
region. IVK could use Google Analytics to see their website traffic on a
student loans website page to see if they are attracting their desired audience.
Without knowing if IVK is attracting the right audience it is difficult to see
if and how they’re meeting their goals.
The other intangible benefits
of using Google Analytics derive from how the system can be used to solve
problems in the financial industry and more importantly, at IVK. As
financial service marketing expert John Siracusa (2013) notes,
Google Analytics helps financial service companies do the
following:
|
GA Benefit
|
GA Benefit to IVK
|
|
Determine whether or not the website is accessible
and useful to non-English speakers.
|
This would increase the market share of
customers for IVK by reaching out to new demographics.
|
|
Recognize the ease of and use of mobile use
with a website
|
Increasingly, customers want to interact with
their banks and financial service companies using mobile apps (Weill
&Woerner, 2014). IVK can use Google Analytics to track and improve their
mobile experience or attract new customers.
|
|
Determine how a customer is utilizing their
site and the conversion rate of new customers
|
This can be used to study what areas of a
site are generating the most interest. Rocket Fuel CTO Mark Torrance
explained that one of the key measures of whether the analytics strategy
was working is whether or not is the ability to measure the adoption rate for
a product (Torrence, 2015). This is important in order to determine
where to place ads and configure what elements of a website will encourage
visitors to become permanent clients.
|
|
Learn where your visitors are from, and what
they are looking for in a company.
|
Currently, IVK is has 16 percent of the
market in financial services and is only capturing 530,000 of the 2.2 million
inquiries the company receives (Austin, Nolan, O'Donnell, 2009).
IVK could utilize this measure to create ads that targeted interests from
various locations and languages.
|
Value of Benefits
vs. Estimated Costs
The greatest value of
subscribing to GA is IVK personnel and IT resources would not be diverted to
building their own solution. Building a solution “diverts company personnel to
a field of expertise that is not their innate domain. This harms not only the
analytics solution, but company revenue as well due to time, money and human
resources getting diverted away from core business” (CoolaData, 2015, para. 7).
With subscribing to GA, IVK could receive a $375,000 tangible benefits from
cost savings over developing their own data analytics platform. As stated in
our Cost Analysis section of this blog, Google Analytics does not have a direct
impact on generating revenue. Intangibly, however, it does add value by helping
companies to gather important data insights, creates an open-flow communication
relationship between IT people and the decision makers, and allows them to
carve out an effective marketing measurement plan. Business intelligence is a
strategic IT goal for IVK to achieve competitive advantage (Austin, Nolan,
& O’Donnell, 2009). To accomplish this, IVK needs to implement a
service-oriented architecture (SOA) utilizing real-time operations to mine data
for trends that yield customer insights (Austin, Nolan, & O’Donnell, 2009).
For example, mining data could reveal characteristics of risks associated with
loans that could give IVK a competitive edge (Austin, Nolan, & O’Donnell,
2009). Due to today’s rapidly changing digital environment,
customers are now in control and real-time reports are needed in order to
provide reliable, accountable and accessible data for marketing analytics (GAA,
n.d.). GA has the capacities to track and gather reports from varies types
of media sources, such as social media sites, mobile apps and etc. It
is also a machine-driven delivery of actual online behavior – when all the
metrics are set up correctly, reflects the actual behavior of potential or
current customers as they interact with the content. However, the ultimate
value comes from being able to interpret the data and trends to determine if
they are real and should be pursued (Austin, Nolan, & O’Donnell, 2009).
URL: Google Tag Manager
How to Use Google Tag Manager
References:
Austin, R. D., Nolan, R. L. & Bonds, S.
(2009). The Adventures of an IT leader. Boston, MA: Harvard Business
Review Press.
DeMers, J. (2014, August 20). 15 google
analytics tricks to maximize your marketing campaign. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/20/15-google-analytics-tricks-to-maximize-your-marketing-campaign/
Google Analytics Academy. (n.d.). Google
analytics platform principles. Retrieved from https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/course02/unit?unit=4&lesson=1
Google Analytics. (2013). Case Studies.
Retrieved from https://www.google.com/analytics/standard/success-stories/#?modal_active=none
Moore, A. (2015, October 16).
Google analytics cost analysis [Telephone interview].
Siracusa, J. (2013, July 25) 5 ways google
analytics can save financial marketers money. The Financial
Brand. Retrieved October 16, 2015 from http://thefinancialbrand.com/32032/google-analytics-for-banks-and-credit-unions/
Torrance, M. (2015, October 20). Rocket
Fuel: Transforming digital advertising with machine learning and AI.
Lecture presented in Mellon Board Room, Chatham University, Pittsburgh.
Weill, P. & Woerner, S. (2014, Spring)
What's in store for your digital enterprise? MIT Sloan Management
Review, 55(3), 1-8. Reprinted.
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