About Atom Insight:
Atom Insight is a London based software consultancy company in the field of Web Analytics , Information Management , Marketing Analytics , Email Marketing and Business Consultancy . A Global Insurance company retained Atom Insight to deliver an Advanced Web Analytics across its 5 European domains .
Objective of the Project:
The insurance company wanted to implement a Web Analytics software in 5 of its domains in Europe . The requirement was very clear. The Web Analytics software should be capable of performing the following :
- Every customer interaction on the website must be captured in details .
- A high-quality reporting and dashboard portal must be developed .
- The data must integrate with other data sources of the company &
- A powerful analytics engine must be provided to suitably use the data .
Atom Insight’s Approach:
Atom Insight spoke with the different client stakeholders and understood the reporting and analytic requirements . They got proposals from several Web Analytics Vendors and finally selected SAS for its product SAS CXA ( Customer Experience Analytics ) after comparing the offers of all the vendors . SAS was asked to run the Proof of Concept ( PoC ) of this product .
Why did Atom Insight select SAS?
The SAS solution is quite an advanced one, and it fares quite well against the above requirements:
- Detailed data capture: The SAS CXA solution captures great deal of detailed data from web interactions eg , mouse movements , clicks , browser scrolls , browser used , screen resolution , apart from the usual web analytics data . So that suits the requirement.
- Reporting and Dashboard: The SAS CXA solution uses the high quality SAS BI clients for reporting and dashboards . These components offer high quality reporting features , user administration and report sharing features .
- Data Integration: The SAS CXA solution uses SAS Meta Data Server , SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS OLAP Cube Studio to build data warehouse and reporting structures . These tools can integrate other data sources into the data model to make them freely available for reporting and analysis with the web data .
- Powerful Analytics: The SAS CXA solution uses an Analytics Platform for forecasting , modeling and statistical analysis .
The PoC was run and system reliability , core data accuracy and reporting and analytic capabilities of SAS CXA were assessed.
Then Atom Insight gathered detailed reporting and analytic requirement and delivered the solution.
Result of the project:
The outcome was as follows :
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Reporting and Dashboard :
The Reporting and BI Dashboards are delivered by an online portal , with central access and rights permissions . In the first view , an end user sees a series of Dashboards . The objective of the dashboards is to highlight key data and trends on a single page , so that an overview of site performance parameters like visitor volumes , conversion rates and revenues is immediately accessible . Dashboards highlight trends and snapshots of key data like such as bounce rates , volumes , conversion , page views , average time on site etc . Wide range of visualisations such as traffic lights , sliders , bar and line graphs and tables with conditional highlighting .
Alerts , ie notifications triggered by KPIs having exceeded a set limit , or fallen outside of a range , are used .
Once the key trends or alerts have been identified in the dashboard , the users then drill down into detailed reporting . Detailed reports are powered by SAS Web Report Studio , and built upon OLAP Cubes and tables in the data warehouse , and enable drill through , slice and dice and render advanced geographical representations of data .
A suite of reports were delivered to fulfill the requirements of all client stakeholders . These included :
Marketing views:
- Source of business
- Paid and natural keyword performance
- Referrer and affiliate reports
- Email marketing performance
Operation views:
- Page Load times
- Slow loading content
- Javascript Errors
- Broken Links
Commercial views:
- Goals ( Sales , Quotes etc . )
- Goal Conversion Rates
- Premiums
- Cross – sell etc .
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Data Integration
A key requirement of the system was that it should be able to integrate the data collected by the CXA product and the client’s back-end database.
This was achieved by populating the “ Transaction complete page “ with the customer and policy id for that transaction. That was then collected into the web data model , and could be used as a Join key, to the back end systems.
Using SAS Data Integration Studio, it was then possible to integrate the data sources into a single data model and create reports that would not be possible without such data integration . For example , it was possible to create reports on the customer renewal rates for each source of business ( Search engine , affiliate , referrer etc . ) This would be impossible if the data were not integrated because the renewals process is entirely offline.
3. Advanced Analytics:
An advanced Web analytics system generates a lot of data . In order to deliver maximum value from the data , we need to deliver advanced analytic capabilities such as forecasting , modeling and statistical analysis . For example , using statistical measures and forecasting techniques , it is possible to define control limits for a measure , such as bounce rate , and to create an alert when this measure exceeds this range in a statistically significant way . It is also possible to optimise the performance of your website and traffic drivers with goal seeking techniques . Statistical models will model the sensitivity of the target variable to changes in website drivers ( click rates , page load times , PPC traffic etc . ) By doing this , it is possible to conduct a cost / benefit analysis on operational drivers and to make the most efficient changes possible to drive the desired result . For example , improving the page load times of the home page by 1 second could have the same effect on the bottom line as spending an extra 100 GBP per month on Google Adwords .
Learning from the project:
From this case study, we learn that it is very important to understand the requirements of a project and then to select a suitable product that can fulfil each of those requirements . Thus , when a right product is selected which has all the capabilities to address the project’s requirement , then delivering it becomes a relatively simple job as we have then only to customise the product’s features to suit the detailed requirement . SAS CXA is an advanced Web analytics software which could solve all the requirements of the insurance company . When the initial selection was done , then it was only a matter of customising SAS CXA ‘s capabilities to suit the requirements of the insurance company , thus leading to the success of the project.
Image Credits: Atom Insight