Friday 1st October 2004
Glen Drury
Gaining the advantage
Kelkoo, founded in 2000, is a shopping search engine that allows you to compare prices and product features on a range of goods such as books, CDs, flights, cars and food and drink. It was recently rated one of the top ten most influential sites of the decade by Nielsen Netratings. It has around 2,200 merchants on its site, advertising their products.
One of the reasons it has been able to scale its presence and profitability (it has been making money since 2002) is through painstaking analysis and measurement of its website traffic, as UK managing director Glen Drury explains. ‘We use a service called Hitwise, which has been indispensable. I sell traffic on the internet so it’s very important to know where customers are on the site, where they go, and what percentage of inbound traffic we get compared to others. We provide around 20 to 25 per cent of our merchants’ traffic,’ he comments. Hitwise provides its customers with insights into the performance of their online presence within their industry. Services include reports on where traffic originates from and goes to before and after visiting a website, an overview of websites in industry categories and how they compare against each other and how internet users search for specific products and services. As well as monitoring traffic movements, Drury also obtains detailed reports which record, for example, the areas on the site where traffic has dropped or increased. He believes the cost (on average between £25,000 and £30,000 a year) is not very expensive considering the amount of usage by the company. ‘I find it cheap considering that the sales, technology and production teams all use it. It’s a great service for providing UK statistics, and I can’t think of a better way of gaining market intelligence.’
Comments [0]
User Comments
There are currently no comments on this post.
Related Articles
People who read this article also read ...
Related sections
Interesting links
|
