Traffic and Conversion

For years, GX has focused on delivering Web Content Management solutions, especially for large, high-traffic customer facing websites.  This year, GX has started to emphasize the product roadmap and our marketing positioning more towards one of our strategic themes Traffic and Conversion. Let me provide some background on why we do this, and what this means for our product portfolio.

The last years we have seen that our customers, mostly mid-sized and large organizations with lots of customer interaction, are starting to use their internet presence in a much more strategic way then before. Only a few years ago most organization where working on building up the infrastructure, the technical knowledge and the organization on how to run your website. Now, especially with a recession, people are looking at the website in a complete other way: how do we achieve our strategic goals with our website. This drive is mainly fueled by the cost-effective, cost-scalable characteristic of the web. Of course, the strategic goals to reach vary wildly between customers. It can be simply to sell more products directly through the Web, it can mean create more leads to hand them over to physical stores or to resellers, it can mean create more brand recognition, cost reduction by using self-service or higher customer satisfaction.

All those goals can be reached by creating more customer interaction, starting a dialog with them, and try to converse them to whatever goal an organization wants to reach. This explains our Traffic & Conversion theme: more traffic means more opportunities to do conversions, and better conversion means better strategic results. You could say:

Result = Traffic * Conversion

This might all sound quite abstract and high-level, but the Traffic & Conversion theme can be surprisingly practical for people managing a website. A few examples:

• If someone visits your website repeatedly, and he or she visit a particular product every time, there is a reasonable chance the visitor is in someway interested in that product, and it might be a good idea to give him or her a discount the next time you visit the product, to see if he or she is now tempted to really buy it.
  
• If people try to fill in a webform consisting of 3 separate pages, and 80% stop at the 2nd  form, there is probably something to optimize there, if only the creators and managers of the forms could see that information right inside the form editor in the CMS
  
• If people consistently search for some keyword on the website, the editors might need to put the information they search for directly on the homepage. This process of content optimization would be heavily improved if this information was available directly in the CMS.
• If the editor of a website can see directly in the CMS that 80% of the visitors click on 1 link on the homepage, he or she might need to optimize that homepage, give that link more visibility, or see what link they click to next, and show them on the homepage too.
  
• The click path, search patterns, frequency and recency of visits etc of visitors gives valuable information about the intent of the visitor. Why not personalize the website, real-time, based on current and past clickpatterns and other online behavior?
  
• If you could integrate products with regular content, for example: see a t-shirt of your favorite soccer club directly next to an article about that club, the chance of someone buying that t-shirt substantially increases. A higher conversion of only a few percentages can mean a substantially better bottom line.
  

We as a WCM provider have made it our mission to provide powerful tools and solutions to facilitate the optimization of professional websites to increase their results. And that is why a lot of the functionalities on the roadmap for 2009 are focused on Traffic and Conversion themes. A few examples:

Anonymous Profiling: Create more insight in your visitors, even when they didn't register. With a pluggable model based on profile part WCBs to define the profile and listener WCBs to fill the profile, anything can be stored in the potentially millions of individual profiles. Listener WCBs available range from keywords used on Google to back office CRM information to clickpaths on the website. Because listeners are pluggable we expect to have lots more listeners in 2009. All these profiles can then be analyzed in Google Analytics, inside GX WebManager and in other external analytics tools, and can be used to target content using personalization features of WebManager, providing your visitors with the content they are (implicit) searching for. This will substantially raise the conversion of your website.

Product Information Management and Order Handling: By integrating your products as tightly as possible with the other content, visitors of your website will be much more tempted to buy a product then on two not very well connected websites. WebManager 9.9 will have a feature rich Product Information Management (PIM) module, to store persuasive product content like marketing texts, images, searchable meta data etc. The content stored inside the PIM is tightly integrated with the rest of WebManager, to give the visitor of the website a seamless experience. The goal is no to have separate websites for your shop and for your 'regular' site anymore, again to raise the conversion rate.

Social Network Integration: We want to provide more and more out of the box tools to integrate with the fast growing world of social networks: websites like Facebook, Twitter and Hyves. Not only does a site owner want to create visibility in those worlds, where people spend an increasingly larger part of their online time, but also make it easier for customers to use logins from those websites, and allow them to copy information over from those sites to the WebManager powered website. Copying and linking that profile information makes it a lot easier to target the customer with the right content, the content he or she is waiting for. So expect us to support OpenId, OpenSocial, oAuth and other upcoming technology standards to make it very easy to integrate with Social Networks

Google Analytics Integration: One of the most important aspects of Traffic and Conversion is the constant evaluation if the editors (‘producers’ might be a better word because of the increasing realtime aspect of website management) of the website reach their targets. With the introduction of APIs in Google Analytics, that evaluation can be done right from within the editor. An editor can see right away, near realtime, if the content he or she created is valuable and is reached, be it pages, forms, product information etc, and can use segmentation to see if the right target group reaches that target.

Search: Search engines on websites are very important. Not only for the visitor, but also for the editors of the website: it gives very valuable information what visitors are looking for, and flaws in the site structure. We will provide deeply integrated search, based on open standards like Lucene, but also integrate deeply with Google, to reach high page ranks, reach high SEO goals etc.

This is only a short preview of what's to come. Martin, our product manager, Leon, our R&D manager and our R&D team are working hard to provide more tools for raising both traffic and conversion, while our services units combined with our partners build solutions based on that technology, directly contributing to the bottom line and providing high value for our customers.