With the Internet penetration gradually rising in India, online advertisers want to tap this segment of visitors. Hence, web analytics tools play a vital role in enabling advertisers to choose the right online medium to get the maximum returns on investment.
Nabler Web Solutions has a host of tools that throws out valuable data for corporates to take the right decisions for their online marketing initiatives.
In an exclusive interview with Sify.com, Seby Kallarakkal, Founder and CEO of Nabler Web Solutions, tells us how the Web analytics platform works and also the company's growth plans in India and abroad.
How does the Web analytics platform work?
Web analytics platform essentially uses three kinds of data.
Clickstream data - this is the data generated when people visit a page, click on a banner, fill a form, or do something on the website.
Experiential data - this involves data from online surveys, usability testing, A/B testing, etc. This data could be a mix of quantitative and qualitative.
Transactional data - this could be order data if it's an ecommerce site, lead data if it's a B2B site, etc.
Web analytics platforms allow you to collect, process and analyse the above data sets. And all these data put together helps businesses take better decisions concerning their digital marketing initiatives.
How big is the Web analytics space and what's your share?
It is difficult to arrive at one number. We have customers from all English-speaking regions. Each region has a different figure for the web analytics space. For example, Forrester projects US to spend close to $430 million in web analytics software in 2009 and growing at a compounded annual rate of 17%.
Econsultancy projects spend of about 78 million pounds on web analytics software and services in UK. We haven't seen any projection done for India yet. It is still a relatively new and small industry, but growing at a good pace.
Almost all areas of digital marketing are growing at an average rate of 20% plus. In some countries like India, the growth is till higher because of the lower base figure. For example, online ad spend in India grew by 45% last year. When the online spend increases, someone will have to be accountable for that money. Someone has to show an ROI for that money spent. And this is where web analytics come in. So as digital marketing spend increases, the web analytics industry too will grow at the same pace.
Organisations used to spend most of the analytics money on web analytics software. But now you have web analytics tools that have zero licensing cost. So money will now move to web analytics services that help companies take decisions based on data.
The online measurement strategy report from Econsultancy shows that 78% of the companies surveyed had not tied data collection to business objectives and strategy. So what's happening is that companies have web analytics software in place, but the next step is not happening. We expect a lot of growth from this segment.
Tell us about the Web analytics market in India?
Web analytics market is India is still evolving. Earlier, it was expensive for companies to get the web analytics software in place. But with free tools like Google Analytics maturing, that really is not a bottleneck anymore. Sure, there are companies who prefer to invest in more expensive web analytical tools for various reasons.
But with free tools in the picture, licensing cost is no longer a barrier for someone to get started. The biggest barrier we see is availability of people who can do web analytics. We know of many customers who got the web analytics software in place, but do not know where to go from there.
We have seen maximum interest in web analytics from companies in the following sectors:
- IT services companies
- Financial institutions like banks and insurance companies
- Online travel booking websites
- E-commerce websites
- Portals
India still has a very low Internet penetration of 5.3%. But the projection is for it to increase to 28% by 2010. When that happens we expect the digital marketing space and web analytics to explode.
Being an early entrant in India, where is Nabler currently positioned?
We have been getting our team, process and tools in place for the last couple of years. Since web analytics was and is still relatively new in India, it was difficult to hire experienced people from the market.
So we had to work on building a team and our own way of training people in web analytics. We also have been busy building various software tools that will help us scale our business. We are now in a position to scale our team and handle the full width of web analytics services.
Can you throw light on Nabler's products and their specific applications?
When we started offering web analytics as a service, we kept coming across situations where the existing tools did not provide an optimum solution. That's how we started building software applications. They are built based on a real need. We are primarily an analytics company and our tools are built from the perspective of an analyst or an online marketing manager.
The products offered by Nabler that are currently available are:
MapMyLead: This is a B2B web analytics tool that help companies generate more leads from their website. MapMyLead works based on Javascript tagging. All the customer has to do is insert a single line Javascript on their website and we can get started immediately.
NT WebStudio: This is a tool that helps online marketing managers keep control of their websites. The main features include:
Spell check on all pages of your website including pages behind user name / password
Compliance check based on style guidelines (for example, you might want to always use the word customer instead of client)
- Missing files / pages / images
- Missing or Incorrect web analytics tags
- Orphaned pages
- W3 Standards compliance check
Deepfish: This is our custom crawler. If a customer has a specific need to crawl the web, we customize it for them.
Where do you see Nabler in five year's time?
We expect to double in the next 12 to 18 months and then continue to grow at a rate of 20 to 30%. A significant portion of our revenue would come from the technology and tools we are developing. Our current customers include large enterprises and digital marketing agencies. But we plan to extend our services to small and medium business as well using technology.
Currently, we operate out of Bangalore and serve customers in India, North America and UK. In the next couple of years, we plan to have customers from other geographies including Latin America. We also plan to establish offices outside Bangalore.
