SOLUTIONS - Make Better Decisions with Business Marketing Intelligence

Business Marketing Intelligence is... the process of gathering information in the field of business. We'll get the right information so that you can make business decisions easier and quicker. Decisions that spell success!

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Technical Intelligence

Strategy / Marketing Research
Survey Research
Polling
Focus Groups
Strategic Marketing Planning

Environmental Scanning
Company Information
Customer Database

Web Analytics
Raw Log File & Hosted Analysis
Search Engine Ranking
Competitor Analysis

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive Intelligence is the process of obtaining and analyzing competitive information from multiple sources to help achieve the objectives of the organization. The term Competitive Intelligence is often viewed as synonymous with Competitor analysis but Competitive Intelligence is more than analyzing competitors - it is about making the organization more competitive relative to its existing set of competitors and potential competitors. Customers and key external stakeholders define the set of competitors for the organization and, in so doing, describe what could be a substitute for the business, votes, donations or other activities of the organization. The term is often abbreviated as CI, and most large businesses now have some Competitive Intelligence functions with staff involved often being members of professional associations such as the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals.

Information regarding daily activities of direct competition is valued highly, especially in the field of Information Technology and marketing in general. However, the scope of Competitive Intelligence is as varied as the personalities of those that sanction it. This includes details about employees, mergers, software acquisition and creation of proprietary software, sales data and forecasts.

Most organizations are concerned about keeping their CI practices above board. Internal CI training and clear-cut, written policies (such as in the employee manual) can help to lessen the likelihood that employees will engage in activities of which the organization would not be proud.

Marketing Research

Research is the search for and retrieval of existing, discovery or creation of new information or knowledge for a specific purpose. Research has many categories, from medical research to literary research.

Marketing research (also called consumer research) is a form of business research. It is a form of applied sociology which concentrates on understanding the behaviours, whims and preferences, of consumers in a market-based economy. The field of marketing research as a statistical science was pioneered by Arthur Nielsen with the founding of the ACNielsen Company in 1923.

Environmental Scanning

For a company to gain or maintain a sustainable competitive advantage, it must be ever vigilant, watching for changes in the business environment. It must also be agile enough to alter its strategies and plans when the need arises.

Environmental Scanning Methods

There are three ways of scanning the business environment:

Ad-hoc scanning - Short term, infrequent examinations usually initiated by a crisis
Regular scanning - Studies done on a regular schedule (say, once a year)
Continuous scanning - (also called continuous learning) - continuous structured data collection and processing on a broad range of environmental factors

Most commentators feel that in today's turbulent business environment the best scanning method available is continuous scanning. This allows the firm to act quickly, take advantage of opportunities before competitors do, and respond to environmental threats before significant damage is done.

Web Analytics

Web analytics is the measurement of the behaviour of visitors to a website. In a commercial context, it especially refers to the measurement of which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase. Many different vendors provide web analytics software and services.

Web Server Logfile Analysis

Web servers have always recorded all their transactions in a logfile. It was soon realised that these logfiles could be read by a program to provide data on the popularity of the website.

In the early 1990s, web site statistics consisted primarily of counting the number of client requests made to the web server. This was a reasonable method initially, since each web site often consisted of a single HTML file. However, with the introduction of images in HTML, and web sites that spanned multiple HTML files, this count became less useful.

Two units of measure were introduced in the mid 1990s to gauge more accurately the amount of human activity on web servers. These were page views and visits (or sessions). A page view was defined as a request made to the web server for a page, as opposed to a graphic, while a visit was defined as a sequence of requests from a uniquely identified client that expired after a certain amount of inactivity, usually 30 minutes. The page views and visits are still commonly displayed metrics, but are now considered rather unsophisticated measurements.

The emergence of search engine spiders and robots in the late 1990s, along with web proxies and dynamically assigned IP addresses for large companies and ISPs, made it more difficult to identify unique human visitors to a website. Log analyzers responded by tracking visits by cookies, and by ignoring requests from known spiders.

The extensive use of web caches also presented a problem for logfile analysis. If a person revisits a page, the second request will often be retrieved from the browser's cache, and so no request will be received by the web server. This means that the person's path through the site is lost. Caching can be defeated by configuring the web server, but this can result in degraded performance for the visitor to the website.

Page Tagging (also known as Hosted Analysis)

Concerns about the accuracy of logfile analysis in the presence of caching, and the desire to be able to perform web analytics as an outsourced service, led to the second data collection method, page tagging.

In the mid 1990s, Web counters were commonly seen — these were images included in a web page that showed the number of times the image had been requested, which was an estimate of the number of visits to that page. In the late 1990s this concept evolved to include a small invisible image instead of a visible one, and, by using JavaScript, to pass along with the image request certain information about the page and the visitor. This information can then be processed by a web analytics company, and extensive statistics generated. This can be done remotely, by the web analytics company.

The web analytics service also manages the process of assigning a cookie to the user, which can uniquely identify them during their visit and in subsequent visits. Until recently, these have usually been third-party cookies — cookies set by the web analytics company's domain rather than by the domain being browsed. However, privacy concerns have now led a noticeable minority of users to block or delete third-party cookies, so many programs are now using first-party cookies instead.

Custom Fit Communications is a certified Click Tracks Web analytics Expert, a International Internet Marketing Association Certified Association and a member of the Web Analytics Association. We provide both Raw Log File and Page Tagging analytics.

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Roy McClean, FOCUS Business Intelligence; Vancouver & Whistler.