Web Analytics in Business Promotion
Quality Alloy, Inc (QA) is an alloy distributing company that followed through with a series of promotion plans to widen its market reach in both the United States and foreign countries. It is a relatively small business company specializing in smaller and more individually tailored orders, and its clientele reflects that. Their customers are mainly business owners, engineers, and other small businesses who cannot buy from alloy producers directly due to their orders’ small size. QA’s promotion companies consist of both traditional and more IT-oriented methods, including a company-based website. It is possible to make the website more functional with the use of analytic web tools.
As a company with a relatively small niche in the market, QA has marketed its products through mail, trade magazines, and online presence: the latter one taking a form of a website. While promotion through magazines and direct mail has been a common practice for a while, websites and other forms of online presence are relatively new. Some companies show understandable caution regarding the online presence and IT methods when it comes to advertising.
Nevertheless, QA created a website in 2008 to drive new sales and make the company more visible to attract more potential customers and business partners. The company’s website took the form of business-to-business (B2B) (Weitz & Rosenthal, 2011). It is a format considered somewhat limited compared to more direct business-to-customer (B2C) websites in many user interactivity areas. While B2B websites have well-known and widely accepted benefits such as furthering advertising, sales, and public relations, it remains hard to determine whether it is effective in promoting a business on a larger scale. Therefore, there has been a debate whether such a web presence is a powerful tool or practical at all.
One way to determine the effectiveness of such a website is through web analytics tools, which are freely available online. Google Analytics is one of them: it is widely used by businesses and average users alike to track how various websites perform. It can determine how many people visit a website, when, and what actions they serve there. IT tools such as Google Analytics, AdWords, and others allow a company to reach more potential customers and tailor the advertising towards exactly the customers a company needs. Such online web tools are essential to understanding how well a web source performs and can determine which types of strategies work and which ones do not.
A few months after the website’s launch in May of 2008, QA commissioned its first promotion to get more visitors for QA’s website, and it was effective. After the initial period, the website’s activity level peaked at slightly over 1500 visits a week, but then the numbers slowed to 500 on average. During a heavy promotion period in mid-December 2008, it peaked at over 3500 visits a week. Even after the promotion ran its course, the average number of visits doubled from the numbers they got at the beginning. While the website saw an increase in weekly visits, it is hard to say how it affected the sales as B2B websites do not offer a “shopping cart” for direct customer and business interaction.
B2-B websites are different from B2C websites in terms of possible interactivity: customers cannot directly order products. They need to submit a request first, and it is then passed further to the company’s sales staff before an order is finalized. It slows down the process, which is especially detrimental to companies that specialize in a fast delivery service. It also makes it hard to track down how much a website affects the company’s sales numbers. While it allows a detailed and documented interaction between the company and its customers as the sales department directly treats each order separately, it can be more efficient.
One way is to utilize the tools available for further promotion of the website to reach more customers. A website needs greater visibility, and they have already done that with a professionally commissioned brochure and AdWords’s sponsored links (Weitz & Rosenthal, 2011). QA is considering a new market area outside of the USA: Asia and Europe specifically. As Weitz and Rosenthal emphasize, “the Asian market was viewed as particularly important” (2011, p. 2). It may become an easier task to achieve with the help of a web presence.
Using a website is a moderately inexpensive method to advertise a company to foreign markets. It can also be specifically designed in a way that correlates to the customer’s country of residence, thus made accessible to various countries. Learning the patterns of user visits and developing advertising techniques is essential in furthering a company’s presence online. When managed correctly, these tools allow them to aim for a target audience that is more likely to be interested in their type of products. Made-in-China.com can be used as an example of a successful website to promote the company (Jiang, 2017). This company shows another excellent example of using a B2B site to reach a foreign market as it aims at countries outside of China for business opportunities.
Nevertheless, it is essential to keep their weak points in mind to minimize the problems potential customers might encounter when interacting with a website. It is also in the company’s best interests to make their experience as smooth and straightforward as possible. The easier time customers have while browsing a website, the more likely they are to use its services. Reaching a foreign market is a goal that requires many resources, but a company can cut down on many of these expenses by utilizing online tools.
While American companies such as QA plan to reach for Asian markets, many Chinese companies aim for the west in order to avoid intense competition in their home market. As Song and Wang (2019) highlight that “foreign trade companies should identify business goals and understand their customer requirement first, and then design the website” (p. 110) in order to ensure that a website is accessible. B2B websites tend to have “no good interactive feedback and support services” (Jiang, 2017, p. 101), which might dissatisfy users. A poorly designed interface can turn customers away from the online service and even the company itself. In modern-day IT technologies and user savviness, it is generally expected for companies to adapt to the users’ needs to provide the best service possible.
The usage of B2-B websites is a business practice that is still relatively new, but it has already proven how useful it can be by companies such as QA. Creating sites and bettering them through the use of online analytic tools can be used to promote sales and boost a company’s reputation in the eyes of its customers. When used together, these methods can achieve greater visibility and a bigger sales number, but thorough research must be done in order to achieve maximum efficiency. It is essential then to create a more efficient way of interacting with the customers and strengthening the business.
References
Weitz, R., & Rosenthal, D. (2011). Web analytics at Quality Alloys, Inc. Columbia Business School.
Song, P., & Wang, X. Z. (Eds.). (2019). 2019 9th International Conference on Management and Computer Science (ICMCS 2019). Web.
Jiang, W. (Eds.). (2017). 4th International Conference on Business, Education, Law and Interdisciplinary Studies (BELIS 2017). Web.