Conventional wisdom holds that Small & Medium Enterprise (SME) businesses are too busy actually running their businesses to spend much time analyzing web trends and other metrics. As with most conventional wisdom, I suppose many examples can be found to support the argument.
My observations, however, having spent time with hundreds of SME employees, differ from the conventional wisdom. The SME owners and operators, in my travels, quite acutely monitor and analyze the critical key measures of the internet to them. I’ve yet to walk into an auto dealer that did not have, at hand, their web lead report that shows leads delivered by source and close rates associated with those leads. Do they typically have a pyschographic expert on staff to analyze consumer demograhics and behavior on their sites? Of course not. Are they paying attention to leads, lead source, lead quality, cost per lead and close rates? You betcha.
More Advertiser Behavior & Analytics
Interesting analytics that ContactAtOnce! generates include time-based distribution of presentations of presence icons and lead requests from prospective customers. The analytics work effectively across all online publishers for a given advertiser.
These analytics demonstrated interesting consumer behaviors in the automotive classified context. The analytics demonstrate two consistent peak times of online automotive classifieds views: in the afternoon business hours and between 10-12 at night, presumably after the kids are in bed.
When presenting these analytics to the sales team for an auto dealer that uses ContactAtOnce!, one of the sales reps had the “Aha moment”. The rep realized he’d be better served by shifting work hours to match the hours that prospects were actually viewing classifieds and engage those prospects when they were shopping for cars. The internet sales rep subsequently shifted working hours to match the peak viewing hours and generated many new leads and sales in the after hours window.
Who says that SME Advertisers don’t pay attention to analytics?