Internet/Web site/Business intelligence

Introduction
Business intelligence can be divided into two categories;
 * 1) Assessing the usefulness of your web presence and
 * 2) Managing your reputation online and keeping an eye on your competitors

Aside from determining web presence and popularity, business intelligence is particularly used to measure company performance and create reports through organized dashboards and scorecards. Various industries take advantage of modern BI, including:


 * Financial service providers - Financial service organizations use business intelligence to help clients better understand the competitive climate and hand them with complete insights to survive and improve finances.


 * Retail markets - Business intelligence assists retail chains to obtain consumer behaviors. Also, BI churns information on how retailers can retain loyal customers. ]

Assessing usefulness of your web presence

 * Google Analytics, includes:
 * Real-Time Reporting: shows you what’s happening on your site - right now! The reports are updated continuously and each pageview is reported seconds after it occurs on your site. ( ‘Home’ tab)
 * Multi-Channel Funnels: See which channels your customers interacted with during the 30 days prior to converting or purchasing. Conversion path data includes interactions with many media channels, including clicks from paid and organic searches, affiliates, social networks, and display ads. Video demo
 * Mobile Reporting: More and more, visitors are using mobile devices to browse the web. Mobile reports in the new version of Google Analytics help you understand how mobile visitors are interacting with your site. You can see which mobile devices your visitors use and optimize for those devices.
 * Flow Visualization: is a sophisticated tool for graphically showing how visitors navigate through your site. Video demo

Web analytics are important tools to measure and analyse the performance of your site some examples are;


 * pages with most views - enables you to focus on content, why are they not visiting some pages?
 * mobile devices - is your page compatible with mobile devices, does it need to be optimized?
 * unique visitors - great to see the traffic to your site and understand if you are capturing your audience, what is your customer base in relation to this?
 * bounce rate - is my content lacking the ability to capture customers?
 * heat map tests- where are customers clicking, do I need more prominent Calls to Action?

Tracking your online reputation is also important as shown in a survey by Cone LLC in 2011 which revealed that 4 out of 5 consumers have changed their mind about a recommended purchase based solely on negative information they found online about a product based on negative online feedback (Cone, 2011) (From Research Assessment, R. Brady, 2011)

Managing your reputation, and keeping an eye on competitors
We all need to be aware of what others can find out about us, and what's being said about us.

Our reputation is made up of what we do and what others say about us.


 * We can use automated search tools to find out what is being said about us and about competitors
 * Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts ) keeps an eye on specified keywords, (such as, your business name,etc) and emails the results.
 * Social mention ( http://www.socialmention.com) does the same but for social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

Keywords chosen could include: (Schollum, 2011, April)
 * your business name;
 * you and employees names;
 * competitors names;
 * related products