SAS helps web marketers attract and keep customers

Companies using SAS Web Analytics can identify their customers, understand their preferences and deliver on those preferences to enhance customer satisfaction, increase customer retention and improve the bottom line.

Successful Web sites are a marriage of good IT, design and business skills. Each of these groups looks at the Web slightly differently given the group's role in the organisation. IT professionals need to understand how Web infrastructure resources are used for capacity evaluation and server load balancing to increase the quality of service provided. Business people need to tie the Web channel to their sales and service targets and strategies to increase revenue through customer acquisition and customer life time value.

SAS Web Analytics puts the business and IT users in the driver's seat by providing Web data management combined with data from customer-facing systems and advanced Web analytics. A role-specific reporting system delivers knowledge to the various stakeholders in the process.

"SAS Web Analytics offers all of the key strengths of SAS software with which we are very familiar, such as expandability, scalability and ease of integration," said Martin Robl, project leader of the Portal Analytics Solution (PAS) at Austria-based OMV, the leading oil and gas group in Central and Eastern Europe. "With SAS Web Analytics, we are now able to verify the success of online banner advertising and other similar activity, and independently determine whether we are getting value for our money.

"Powered by SAS Web Analytics, PAS has already saved us a lot of time and resources, showing us where we can invest our creative efforts in the portal to maximum effect," added Robl. "More importantly, it will help us serve customers better by improving the usability and quality of our Web pages."

SAS Web Analytics is fully integrated with SAS 9 analytics and can work in unison with SAS Customer Intelligence solutions, such as SAS Marketing Automation 4. SAS Web Analytics uses data mining capabilities to recognise patterns that drive customer success online. Information from the online channel is incorporated into a full customer data warehouse across all channels for a quick understanding of how to improve customer conversion and service.

"Web customers demand better service and ease-of-use. With SAS Web Analytics and its ability to merge large volumes of Web data with other customer-facing systems and apply visualisation tools and sophisticated analytics, Web marketers can meet and exceed their customers' demands. Using the analytic capabilities of SAS, companies can greatly improve their customer relationship efforts and increase customer retention, resulting in increased revenue and lower total cost," said Richard Roach, senior director of worldwide marketing at SAS.