Monitoring Movement in the Cardiff Websites - Case Study Example

? Business Intelligence Part At present time, the Cardiff and company run more than nine websites. Most of these are for the purpose of marketing the vast opportunity that Cardiff offers. The decision to divide the websites is informed by the need for delegation and fragmentation. Each website addresses a single issue exhaustively. The main issues covered by each of these include education, investment opportunities, visitations and tours, live work and an events study. Additionally, the company runs a number of other websites on the very same categories but in different other languages among which are Arabic, French and Spanish. Each of the categories requires a unique packaging and presentation. Furthermore, the type of targeted market differs with every category of product or service advertised in each website. Some of these include: Education Education is a two-pronged economical scope. The Cardiff city hopes to become an academic center within the region. To achieve this, the envisioned city must have strategies capable of beating other modern day academic centers such as Liverpool and London. The city must therefore have schools running and education centers from kindergarden to the university. Theses academic institutions will need accreditation by government authorities to check that they meet the standards of quality (Bogomolova, 2011). The website runs the opportunities that the education sector presents to potential investors. The most common investment opportunity in the academic sector is the setting up and management of private academic institutions. To this end, the website targets the currently existing universities such as Oxford and Liverpool among others to invest in the establishment of new campuses within the city. The website offers basic contact information on how interested parties conduct the transactions of obtaining land and other resources necessary for such developments. The company welcomes both local and foreign investors, thus the translation into different other languages. Additionally, the website targets potential students. The education sector primarily depends on the availability of students. Attracting students in the region becomes difficult since children school in regions where their parents reside. The company thus runs a number of other websites advertising other diverse investment opportunities with an aim of attracting as much residents into the city. This way, the basic level academic institutions are certain of pupils (Jiaming, 2008). Tertiary and university level are not much perturbed by the locality of parents. This is thus a level opportunity and depends on the advertisement potential of the company and the reputation of the subsequent universities that will eventually set up in the region. Visit, Meet, Invest and Shops These four are massive investment opportunities that the Cardiff and company seeks to capitalize in, the thus each have a separate website which are later translated into other three to four different languages depending on the position and locality of the target market. The Cardiff city hopes to become a number one tourist destination in the country and transform the outlook of Wales. This daunting task will require the involvement of different sector players. The company therefore runs the websites displaying the available natural attractions in the region and provides possible facelifts required in and around every one of them. The websites thus targets tycoons in England and around the world for opportunities in the unexploited hospitality industry. In conjunction to the Visit website, the Meet websites offers a platform where interested parties meet and exchange ideas. In such social gatherings, the investors make possible business contracts geared towards the development of the city. Additionally, a chance to gather all the interested participants in the project further kick starts the development project, as most of these people will require boarding facilities while touring the virgin land. Additionally, the trainings serve as venues for training the investors and offering them both legal and social guidelines on the type of investments required in the facility. The shops provision in the website offers a number of services. The website displays the shops owned by the company and the services rendered in the shops. These purposely serve to attract potential clients to the good dispensed and services offered in the shops. They thus target possible visitors of the new city or interested residents. The other more important function is to attract potential developers and investors. This site runs potential opportunities on the types of shops required in the property as designed in the official blue print. This specifically target property developer and esteemed businesspersons. The investments required in the area are expensive and will require intense financial commitments from interested parties. The invest provision gives the detail of actual materialization of the investment opportunity. In this, the interested investor meets the company with an aim of leasing or buying the property. The site therefore contains contacts information and provides hyperlinks that make the investor meet the company. The website further runs the terms and conditions as they apply. Each investment opportunity has its unique demand and regulations. The website details all these so as to inform the potential client on the actual terms of acquisition of the property. After reading and understanding all these, the investor proceeds to meet the company and make payments for the property. By then, it is assumed that the investor has understands the terms and is therefore signing a legally binding document, making a legal commitment as espoused on terms of either lease or purchase. The use of Google Analytics The main aim of the Cardiff and Company project is to sell the idea to as many people throughout the world as possible. They are therefore trying their level best to make the product as visible as it can get. However, visibility of the brand and the product should attract investment in equal measure. The effectiveness of the websites developed by the company will not simply be measured by the number of visitors they receive a day, this statistics is very important but not at all of direct relevance to the creation of the websites. The effectiveness of the websites is thus calculated by comparing the number of visitors in each website and the number of potential investors who finally make credible inquiries into the products and services (Tabbush, 2011). To monitor the movement in and across its websites, Cardiff and company use the Google Analyst, which is a service offered by Google. The service helps trace visitors of a website and offers links to their personal details such as email address and any other information made available through the inclusion of the email address. The service is offered free of charge and the service providers make its premium version available for free also. Google Analyst is the most commonly used internet-tracking software. In collaboration with other search engines, the service tracks visitors from any reference or origin. This service is appropriate for this new company not only in showing the statistics of visitors but also in indicating the amount of visitors the websites receive. At initial stages, it is not expected that the project websites begin drawing in investors. The sheer number of visitors reflects the visibility that the project develops with each day. The tracking service indicates which site is frequently visited, this way the company learns what to include in an effort to attract more visitors and thereby creating more visibility for the company and the new city. In this regard, the service becomes a freely available market research tool. It is easy to use and very convenient. The company also gets to learn of the services less required and may thereafter devise ways of repackaging them to ensure that they receive positive response from the target market (Iacobucci, 2012). In tracking visitors, the service helps the company run subsequent advertisements. The internet is not the only media through which the company may advertise the new city. However, advertising the entire plan on a radio or television channel may prove to be very costly especially if transmitted through the international channels such as the CNN and the BBC at prime times. However, with effective analysis of the movement of clients in their website, the company establishes the desirable products and or services for which it thus runs short effective adverts on other mainstream media such as newspaper and radio. Furthermore, the company employs the use of the tracking service in determining the background of their potential clients. Through the hyperlinks and other search engines, the service track and makes available all the basic information about a visitor. Most tycoons who would thus be the potential market for the websites is later followed up through other more secure channels of communication depending on the interest they reveal over a particular product or service. The level of interest is established through the nature of the visit. A visitor who spends more time analyzing the particular specifications of a product is most definitely an interested one. This way the deal is brokered much faster (Richard, 2003). Besides the Google Analyst, there are a number of other online tracking services and service provider. Among the most common are the data minder, Surf Pattern Visual analyzer and 11 Ants Model Builder. These facilities have different specifications and function differently. Each of them has diverse strengths and weaknesses. The 11 Ants model builder, for example, presents the visitor history in an Excel sheet. This is easier to analyze since one simply ties one visit to the other and the eventual origin of the visitor. However, the service is not stable and is not compatible with most Windows operating systems used by most computer users. Of all available visitor tracking services, the Cardiff and company settles for Google Analyst because this is the greatest of such service providers. It is built to be used by the most novice of all computer users. This makes it simpler and easier to master user interface. It has fewer navigational aids and is therefore appropriate for a cooperate society, one which has unique population pattern. The service is free of charge. This makes it a cost effective service and it is high quality. Part 2 The use of Google Analyst in monitoring movement in the Cardiff websites gives more information capable of being systematically analyzed to reveal other aspects of the potential clients directly useful in the marketing and promotional process, which is the main mandate of the company. In analyzing the results from the tracking technology, the company statistically categorizes their visitors to determine the possibility of any visit materializing into a possible sale or business transaction. Some of the most common software and computer programs that help perform this include the 11 Ants build model (Levesque, 2007). The 11 Ant Build Model. The program is simple to use too. It is effective in data mining and presents its findings in an Excel sheet format. This implies that the software is customizable to fit the unique requirements of the company. Its eventual results are thus tabulated as had previously been customized. In the spreadsheet cells, the company may opt to include such information as customer profiling. In this the program presents the basic information about the customer, some of these include the name of the customer and his locality among other basic details that are available online. The software largely depends on the email address of the customer. Each of the emailing services requires different information when signing up for an account. It is this information that the data-mining tool eventually retrieves. In geographical segmenting, the data mining tool categorizes the customers based on their locality. Such information is useful to the company in determining the whereabouts of the clients and any possible implications brought about by the local culture or religion of the customer (Wellman, 1988). The analysis of the data retrieved from the data-mining engine is important in determining the success of the entire process. There is a number of data analysis technologies, each of which presents its unique strengths and weaknesses. The choice of which to use further determines the success of the entire analysis. Some of these technologies include the Decision tree technique. This aligns the data based on importance. The most important comes to the top and as it moves down in branches, it continues to reveal the factors leading to the decision at the top. Just as the name suggests, it outputs its results in a possible tree structure with each factor leading to the development of a subsequent one put on top of theme. It progresses the factors this way to the final and most important of all placed on top of the rest (Argyrous, 2001). The tree is easy to interpret since one simply connects a factor to those arising right below it. This technology works best with the 11 Ant build model data mining technology which analysis presents its data on a spreadsheet. The cells of the spreadsheets are joined by common factors, which can subsequently be used to develop an effective decision tree. Some other technologies are equally important and applicable in the analysis of any data mined by the tracking services. These include clustering algorithms, which clusters together similarly occurring factor. A reference to a single cluster implies similar factors of occurrence. This makes the technology easy to use. However, the clustering, if not effectively customized, confuses users thereby making understanding more difficult than the decision tree technology. References Argyrous, G. (2001). Statistics for Research: With a Guide to SPSS. London: Sage. Bogomolova, S. (2011). Service quality perceptions of solely loyal customers. International Journal of Market Research, 53(6) 793-810. Iacobucci, D. (2012). MM2 (2nd ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning Jiaming, Y (2008). Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, Melbourne, Springer. Levesque, R. (2007). SPSS Programming and Data Management: A Guide for SPSS and SAS Users. Oxford: OUP. Richard, B. (2003). Vocational business training, developing and motivating peope,. New York: McGraw-Hill. Tabbush, et al. (2011). MBA primer: Marketing management 3.0 instructor-led printed access card (3rd ed.). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning. Wellman, B. (1988). Doing it ourselves. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press. Read More