I spy with my little eye – DIRECT Magazine

Tracking consumers behaviour online translates into marketing gold. Kevin Trye discusses the practice and the moral implications involved.

The tracking abilities in the digital realm are now immense. Those who have run email campaigns see a glimpse of the possibilities. We know who opens our emails, when and if they clicked on any of the enclosed links. Handy stuff.

It gets better. As a real-world example, last month I did our first DM and email campaign with personal URLs included, to promote the first PODI educational workshop in Auckland for digital print and mailing providers. These new pURL tools naturally have slick reporting and charting, telling me response rates, when each person visited their own pURL landing page, etc. But to improve things, I decided to add in my own getclicky.com analytics, which, unlike Google’s, provide me visitor feedback in real-time.

I could now call up the person minutes after they arrived at their pURL page, since I could set-up filters and email alerts to my smartphone, and they say, “…well, what a coincidence, I was just visiting your site”.

This is obviously very good from a marketing and sales perspective. In sales, good timing and follow-up are everything.

But I have always been unsure of what to tell them as to why it happened. Should I tell the truth and say, “actually, my system told me you were on the site”? Some people are surprised and others annoyed, and sometimes both. They are simply not aware that they can be tracked like this. Certainly not in real-time. For us older people, thoughts of Big Brother arise, from George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984.

Back to reality. The other handy, and very powerful, marketing idea I got from this is that I can now use this same visitor data obtained off the purl sites to track people or companies when they visit my main website too. It is made easy since most are on broadband these days and have a static IP address, which my clicky analytics allows me to tag with the company and/or visitors name. It is not a perfect system, but would be correct around 90 per cent of the time. Traditionally to track movements to an individual meant they would have to log into my website at some stage and pick up a ‘cookie’ or similar. Easier perhaps if you have an ecommerce site established.

I suspect the one hundred plus high-end ‘digital marketing systems’ available today do all of this much better than my cheap package put together in an evening. regardless of the tools chosen, the bottom line is I now know which of the clients/prospects in my database is visiting my website on a day-to-day basis, in response to various marketing efforts, be they online or offline. Good warm sales leads for sure.

Now we have the power, how do we use it?

But knowing about all this and its business potential, how do we promote it as an industry?

Firstly, do software vendors do a proper job of telling marketers and business owners what is possible and the underlying business benefits? This is powerful stuff and if utilised well, could easily double many a company’s sales and growth potential quite quickly.

Secondly, do we have any responsibility to tell customers who receive our direct mail or email communications, then visit our website that they are being tracked this meticulously? We know who they are, what they do on our site, how long spent on each page. Remember these are casual visitors. They have not yet logged into our site with the intention of buying stuff.

Yet this tracking technology helps the business out in many ways. For example over time it can tell us which products or areas are of most interest and perhaps give early warnings of items we should or shouldn’t stock. The savings could be huge. Those in the retail or fashion markets especially. We can see which of our web pages have a high bounce rates and may need to be modified either by design or an improved offer.

There is good science behind all these things that can turn things around for many companies large and small. Anyone who has read the works of Bryan Eisenberg will know what we mean. But at what point does good marketing science cross over to an invasion of privacy?

My guess is that until the public learn that such things are happening, there won’t be a problem. After all – it is good for business.

Kevin is a Freelance marketing technologist and systems engineer, helping printers streamline their workflows and introduce personalized crossmedia.