Exhibit 19.4 Through Search Engine Optimization, Knight Frank achieves tremendous
growth in traffic (clicks) to its KFMAP site.
The internet adds a rich new stream of data that reveals
extensive information about consumers and their behaviours, and marketers can leverage this
information to tailor their marketing initiatives and measure their success using web analytics.
This capability enables them to fine-tune their efforts and improve their returns on marketing
investments.
Web analytics also allows marketers to track a consumer’s progress through the
prospecting funnel, from a lead to an enquiry, enquiry to prospect, and prospect to customer,
yielding a wealth of information that reveals the impact of their marketing mix and assesses
the health of their online properties. For example, Knight Frank’s KFMAP website experienced a
surge in impressions and growth in site traffic through search engine optimization (SEO). Relying
on data from platforms like Google Search Console (refer to Exhibit 19.4) and Google
Analytics, the author could track the impact of initiatives and optimize the site for search
engines.
Practitioners also use analytics systems like Google Ads to track and optimize
search advertising and analyse their digital marketing efforts on major social networks. These
analytics systems are free and accessible through user-friendly platforms.
Information about consumers can also be mined from social media platforms and websites using APIs (application programming interfaces) and web scraping techniques. By applying NLP (natural language processing) techniques and text analytics to analyze online conversations, marketers can gain valuable insights into their target audience.
For sectors such as financial services, analytic techniques are being used to
quantify risks, enabling businesses to weed out risky transactions.
Furthermore, data-empowered and technologically-enabled systems and processes are
yielding gains in productivity, leading to significant cost reductions.