Assignment Task
Business Intelligence and Data Visualization -  Excel and SPSS  - Web Analytics at Quality Alloys, Inc - IT Assignment Help

TASK:  Company Background Quality Alloys, Inc. (QA)1 is a relatively small (less than $75 million in annual sales) US-based distributor of different grades of a variety of alloys used in industrial manufacturing. Its products include, for example, refractory alloys, which have the property of maintaining strength at high temperatures and are used in furnaces and aircraft turbine engines. QA’s market niche is based on a number of factors: 1. It has expert knowledge regarding which suppliers manufacture the different grades of alloys and those who do so reliability. 2. It sells in small quantities. 3. It cuts material to user-specified sizes, with tolerances of less than .001 of an inch. 4. It ships items in stock the same or next day. QA’s customers are generally small companies that make parts out of the alloys they purchase. They generally can’t buy directly from mills (the alloy producers) as their orders are not large enough. These customers do not inventory the alloys purchased from QA, and they typically purchase what they need for specific jobs they have in hand. One purchase may not be an accurate predictor of future purchases; that is, one purchase may not signal what will be purchased in the future, or when a future purchase will occur. The individuals making the purchasing decisions may be engineers, purchasing agents, or the business owners. QA is well-respected in its market space. Its competitors are other intermediaries providing similar services. QA markets its products through direct mail, advertising in trade magazines and, more recently, via paid listings on two industrial product web portals, GlobalSpec and ThomasNet. In mid-2008 QA decided to extend its marketing reach by establishing a company web presence. The goals of the company’s website were to (a) drive new sales, (b) make product and contact information available, and (c) give or add legitimacy to its brand. Further, in addition to providing QA with another opportunity for reaching out to its traditional clients, management thought the website would enable QA to extend its reach to many more customers in the United States, Europe, and Asia. The Asian market was viewed as particularly important to QA given the shift towards manufacturing in the Pacific Rim. Given the intricacies of QA’s products, the website was not designed to allow users to enter orders over the web. However, in addition to providing descriptions of the products and services offered by QA, the website does allow potential customers to submit a request for quotations; that is, a request to be contacted. These requests are given to inside sales staff for follow up. As is the case for other business-to-business (B2B) providers, there’s no direct way to connect a visit with a sale as there is no “shopping cart” on the website. QA commissioned a professionally produced brochure providing an overview of the company’s products and services and sent it to potential customers in mid-December 2008. The list of potential customers and their addresses was purchased by QA. The total cost of the promotion is estimated to be approximately $25K. There are a number of questions that would be useful for QA to have answered before investing in further promotional activities. Foremost of these are the following: ? How many people visit the website? How do they come to the website? ? Is the website generating interest, and does this interest yield actual sales? ? Do traditional promotions drive web traffic, and in turn drive incremental sales? ? How can visits to the website best be modeled? ? Where and how should QA advertise? Business Value Assessed While the usefulness of B2B websites in terms of advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and marketing is generally recognized, valuing B2B websites remains elusive. For business-to-consumer (B2C) websites, the valuation task is facilitated by the fact that purchases are typically made via the website. Data can be compiled on sales volume, the effect of promotions on sales, how website design changes impact sales, etc. For B2B websites without “shopping cart” functionality, the task is considerably more challenging. A principal conclusion of a Forrester Report on B2B marketing is that “business-to-business (B2B) marketers collect mounds of data . . . but still struggle to find effective ways to measure and demonstrate success.” closely linked to organizational effectiveness.3 Others, on the other hand, have gone so far as to argue that “IT doesn’t matter.”4 Web Analytics QA’s website developer utilized Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/), a free web analytics tool so that the site would track, and QA management would have access to, a wide variety of web metrics. Google Analytics is implemented by putting the appropriate code, provided by Google, on each web page. The data collected is sent to Google; users, like QA managers, access it by logging in to their Google Analytics account. Typical metrics include the number of visitors to a site, the amount of time they spent on the site, the number of pages viewed, etc. Apart from Google Analytics, QA participated in Google’s AdWords program.5 AdWords ads are the “sponsored links” that appear next to, and sometimes above, Google search results. That is, QA paid to have these ads (with links to the QA website) appear on the Google search result page when relevant search terms (specified by QA) were used. Website Visits Figure 1 is a plot of the number of visits to the QA website per week over the period May 25, 2008–August 29, 2009. The start date was the first full week the website was available to visitors. The end date was selected as it coincided roughly with the launch of another QA website, which had the potential of affecting the data at the primary website. The time frame includes the direct mail brochure promotion sent during December 2008. IT Assessment Answer Assignment Your job, as a trusted advisor to QA management, is to examine the value of QA’s website by tracking not just website metrics (e.g., visitors, pages/visit, time per visit, etc.), but the associated (non-web-based) financial measures of sales, profit and amount of merchandise sold. One focus of your efforts should be an analysis for senior management regarding the effectiveness of QA’s promotional effort. Your report should be submitted in two parts. The first part should be an executive summary. It should summarize results and provide recommendations to QA managers as to how they might best market their business with an aim towards improving sales. Your recommendations may rely on your knowledge and experience beyond the case, but your suggestions must be supported by the data and your analyses. (You may, and probably should, do additional analyses other than those required here. You should at least review all the data.) You can use the questions from the Company Background section of this document on page three as a guide for what your summary should cover. Finally, note that this is a “real-world” case; that is, depending on your analysis you may not have all the data you want. You may certainly include as part of your recommendations that additional data be collected. The second part of your report should be responses to the questions posed in the Analysis section that follows. Be sure your responses are numbered, corresponding with their respective questions. There is no need for added verbiage, just your answers to the questions in order. It’s preferable if this is submitted in Word or .pdf format. Excel and SPSS printouts are fine as long as they are neatly formatted. You should do the second part (the quantitative analysis) prior to doing the first part (the executive summary). Be sure to read through the entire case at least once before proceeding.

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  • Posted on : December 03rd, 2018

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