Digital travel assistance leader analyzes visitor behavior

As one of the largest map and itinerary search portals in Europe, this company designs, develops, and markets a range of digital mobility assistance products and services for European road travelers. The company’s website provides useful information for getting around town or travelling by road. To make travel easier, the company regularly updates it website with new services and features such as: seven types of itineraries, keyword search engine, high-definition aerial and satellite photographs, traffic information on-demand, hotel reservations, five-day weather forecast, information from the company guides, and readers’ comments on hotels, restaurants, and tourist attractions.

The company offers several types of specialized services:

• A web portal that provides maps and itineraries enriched with information on tourism, dining, and practical details from the company’s guides, plus hotel reservations and many other convenient travel services
• A range of GPS solutions enabling clients to use the company’s itinerary and hotel reservation modules on their own internet sites or on portable devices
• Real-time traffic news for GPS suppliers and automobile makers
• Geo-tagged content for auto-makers and iPhone applications

The company chooses IBM® NetInsight®
With enormous volumes of information, the company requires a heavy-duty, high-performance web analytics solution. The organization decided to implement the IBM Unica web analytics solution because it provided detailed analysis of website visitor behaviors. The company’s former solution only allowed them to collect web page log files and inject them in a database to eventually be presented in internally generated reports. “Thanks to IBM NetInsight, the company can analyze visitor behavior data much more accurately than before,” said the company’s IT Director. “We use this information to optimize the site.”

Marketers empowered with web behavioral insights
The company derives value from the following IBM NetInsight behavioral analysis capabilities:

• Surfing path analysis. Where do the visitors who make the most reservations on the site come from? What do visitors do once they have checked the requested map or itinerary? IBM NetInsight answers these and many other kinds of questions.
• Event analysis. When seemingly incoherent or unexpected data appears, the company can investigate and audit the reports by drilling into the visitor-level data behind the numbers. For example, they can check whether robots are artificially skewing web analysis results. The visitors’ surfing paths can be tracked in order to identify the series of actions that brought them to a page, whereas they may have been expected to go to another route (for example, why was the hotel reservation not finalized?).
• Historical analysis. Volumes of data have been such that the preceding solution was unable to store enough historical data for comparative analysis. Today, the company can keep data for meaningful periods of time, providing marketers with a detailed historical baseline record for in-depth analysis.

Integration into other in-house marketing systems
“Today, the reports IBM NetInsight generates provide detailed analysis of visitor behavior, and feed information to our internal reporting software, updating KPIs for the site: number of visitors’ segment by segment, comparison with data from years past, length of time spent on the site, geo-positioning of visitors, referencing by search engines, and more. The Marketing department can thus tailor offers or editorial content to visitor expectations,” noted the IT Director. “IBM NetInsight helps us to constantly better identify our visitors’ actions.”

The results
IBM NetInsight helps provide answers to myriad marketing questions about the website’s organization, content and offers. “With IBM NetInsight, we have found a balance between the marketing side and the technical side,” continued the IT Director. “We update reports daily and answer all of the Marketing team’s questions to optimize their actions and offers made, for example with our hotel partners.”

Moreover, since we can now keep detailed, individual-level visitor data for longer periods of time, it is easier to put information into perspective. Trends emerge, empowering Marketing to take strategic action. Finally, IBM NetInsight’s graphical user interface allows the company to visualize data according to a number of pre-set analytical criteria, such as geographic location, length of visit, or whether visitors are anonymous or registered and identified.

For more information
To learn more about IBM Unica products, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/software/info/unica.

Smarter Commerce: An integrated approach
IBM Unica products are part of the IBM Smarter Commerce initiative. Smarter Commerce is a unique approach that increases the value companies generate for their customers, partners and shareholders in a rapidly changing digital world. To learn more about Smarter Commerce, visit ibm.com/smarterplanet/commerce.