Integrating web analytics and e-commerce is helping VisitBritain boost sales from its websites

Overview

VisitBritain, the official website of the British Tourist Authority, wanted to understand more about how its visitors arrived and progressed to make purchases online. The intention was to establish the best ways to promote the site and to better understand how visitors used it, before making decisions to purchase complete holidays or related items such as tickets and travel options.

The Challenge

It was a challenge that meant integrating web analytics software with e-commerce applications across a number of different websites that are aimed at visitors from many different countries.

Every web publisher needs to know how many visitors come to a website, and to find out how they get there. It is equally vital to know how many make a purchase, and what sells best online. However, it’s only when those two massive amounts of data are linked together that you can really start to work out how to turn visitors into customers instead of mere browsers. It’s only then that you can really understand how your most important customers are finding your web pages, and whether the adverts you’re running are merely generating traffic or actually resulting in sales.

The Solution

VisitBritain commissioned SCL to integrate the data from its Unica NetInsight web analytics software with the e-commerce databases of its online shops. The aim was to answer the following kinds of questions:

• Which Pay per Click (PPC) keywords and creative produce the most paying customers?
• Which email-based marketing campaigns are most successful?
• are visitor purchases influenced by different landing pages?
• Which organic and paid search engine terms ultimately generate the most sales as opposed to most visitors?