Home > Products & Services > Pilot HitList > Case studies

Download case study (277 kb)

Closing the marketing loop - How Informa Telecoms Group is using analytics to make the connections

Informa Telecoms Group is the largest market-facing unit within the Informa media business. It melds a sophisticated mix of online and offline content and commerce and uses technology such as Pilots internet analytics software to help understand who it sells to and how they are reached.

Informa Telecoms' six specialist divisions provide high quality news, analysis and networking opportunities to over 75,000 customers worldwide each year. It encompasses many well-known business brands. IBC Global Conferences organises events such as GSM World Congress, IP World Series and UMTS Congress Series. Its consultancies include EMC, the cellular market data specialist and Chorleywood, the billing and customer care experts. Its media arm, the Informa Telecoms Publishing Group, has a portfolio of over 100 international titles. The Group has offices in seventeen countries that feed information to customers from over 180 nations.

Working out where the customers come from

The company symbolises the true definition of a multimedia operation. Its products and services are presented in a multitude of formats: conferences, exhibitions, online, newsletters, written reports, magazines, yearbooks, training courses, management consultancy, technical guides, industry directories and CD-ROMs. The business's ongoing investment in electronic formats continues to pay dividends with the proportion of the full Informa Group's profit derived from electronic products rising from 11 per cent in 2000 to 23 per cent in 2002.

As Duncan Miller, ebusiness director of Informa Telecoms and Media explained, the group must understand the interaction between these different formats and in particular was keen to make sense of how its online and offline channels worked together. "The use of internet analytics tools helps us understand how revenues are generated online, something that is often very complex." He stresses the need to reduce the haze through which online commerce's impact is measured. "It's not good enough for us to just know we're doing well and hitting revenue targets. The main purpose of analytics is for closing the marketing loop - we want intelligence so we can repeat what is working - a mailing campaign to draw online applications for a trade show, for example." His team is constantly exploring methods of connecting the online and offline elements of its events, publishing and consultancy businesses.

"Events, for example, are very much driven by promotion to achieve either attendance or sponsorship. In a purely print-based world we would have sent out a brochure and received a response. Such clean marketing response no longer occurs - use of the internet, email forwarding and links mean it is less clear how we acquired customers. We have deployed internet analytics technology to avoid promotion planning becoming a dark art."

His team has implemented the HitList product, working closely with London-based technology consultancy ISSEL. HitList is part of Informa's set of business analysis and reporting tools and allows it to collect and analyse key web usage data including traffic volumes and user behaviour. A wide range of users access the system and its reports, ranging from board members seeking quick evidence of return on investment to the technical staff who wish to check performance. "Internet analytics can mean a lot to almost every function in the organisation. The challenge is to make it accessible and meaningful," says Miller.

The project to extend the use of analytics is ongoing and ensuring the systems can meet everyone's expectations is a constant challenge. "People assume technology is the universal panacea. They think because we're online we can know anything. But it's not that simple - and it can be time consuming and expensive to draw out the right information."

Figure 1
How Informa Telecoms Group's people benefit from internet analytics

It's about more than volume

Unlike many online operations which wrestle with the challenges of analysing very high traffic volumes, Informa is far more concerned with smaller volumes of higher value users and ensuring their very specific needs are being met. "We are not analysing millions of hits per day like many portals or retailers. But our visitors potentially spend far more than the value of a paperback novel - by far the most important and steady element of our overall business is our subscription operations." Subscription income in 2002 accounts for around a third of the Informa Group's revenue and around 40 per cent of its operating profit.

Miller's team has used internet analytics to help improve subscription renewals. "Using HitList we can monitor visitors and how they interact with our content. That way we can identify when a subscriber seems to be losing interest and target that customer with physical or electronic mail to remind the customer what they're missing or flag up potentially more suitable services to meet their needs." Such an approach is contributing to Informa's exceptional renewal rates - Informa Group's overall subscription renewals currently run at around 80 per cent per annum.

Analysing traffic volumes fails on other fronts. Only the more sophisticated analytics can help to assess the real benefits of working with a particular partner. Miller suggests that a marketing relationship designed to provide subscriptions or consultancy leads may generate relatively low volumes of traffic but those few sales could generate a lot of revenue.

Changing times

This all adds up to what Miller sees as a change in the nature of internet analytics. He believes a fundamental shift in thinking from technical concepts to business concepts is occurring. "Out are file paths, browser types and IP addresses; in are people, actions, buys, downloads, products and promotions. In essence we're talking about a next generation of analytical demands."

The business has faced significant challenges in the past year, being forced to weather not only the problems of the stormy telecoms sector but also the falls in advertising and business travel that occurred during 2001. It has weathered these difficulties successfully. Overall Informa Group turnover was up by 9 per cent in 2001 to £323 million, despite a fall in the number of delegates attending its conferences of on average 16 per cent and a fall in advertising of 8 per cent.

Without online channels the company would not be anywhere near where it is today. The Informa Group found that 22 per cent of delegates booked over the internet in 2001. With around 20 per cent of these registrations coming from new customers, these channels - and their interaction with offline ones - offer great promise. "Over the past few years we have made a lot of new money - revenues that simply couldn't be generated unless we were offering content or commerce online. We take nothing for granted and place great importance on understanding how we are generating business. Internet analytics is absolutely key to making those connections and its role can only get bigger."