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Even if you don't expect your company's Web site to contribute a substantial percentage of corporate revenue, it can still be a key strategic channel.

That was one way speakers at yesterday's CRM Summit tailored their presentations for the post-burst-Internet-bubble world. The summit was part of the eTail 2002 East conference taking place in Boston through tomorrow.

"The Web is an experimental laboratory," said Ronny Kohavi, senior director and chief evangelist of business intelligence at Blue Martini Software Inc., which, with IBM, sponsored the daylong summit. He advised attendees to test new products and marketing campaigns with small groups of online customers before rolling them out sitewide or in stores.

The Web can help companies discover what customers want in a way not possible in other retail channels. Consumer Reports, for example, looks at results of failed search requests to see what new information its readers seek. If, say, there were many failed searches for "Webcam" because the Consumer Reports Web site had no articles rating Internet video cameras, it might be a signal to assign an article on the subject.

Likewise, failed searches can tell retailers what products their customers are interested in that the company doesn't currently offer, Kohavi said. This doesn't mean retailers should run out and stock merchandise unrelated to their core missions; but companies can look to partner with other sites that do carry such products -- and get referral revenue.

Kohavi said collecting more information can help businesses tailor strategies for different types of customers, and scrutinizing Web site activities can make a site more successful. Blue Martini worked with Harley-Davidson Inc. to analyze drop-off rates for each page of a particular e-commerce process on the site, he said. Based on the findings, Harley-Davidson revamped the process, resulting in a 120% increase in revenue from that area of the Web site.

What data to collect? Most e-commerce Web sites collect and save basic server log information such as user IP address, pages visited and time spent on the site. However, Blue Martini Software's Ronny Kohavi suggests some additional data that could be useful:

USER'S LOCAL TIME: Tracking when someone comes to your site based on your server's time doesn't tell you whether they're browsing before breakfast local time or after work. Knowing this could help tailor a retail strategy.

SCREEN RESOLUTION: While not an absolute indicator, there's a reasonable correlation between high resolutions and more technical users.

FORM ERRORS: Seeing where the errors are made on Web data-entry forms can help companies redesign forms that are more user friendly.

WORTH OF CLICK-THROUGHS: It's not enough for a retailer to see that one search engine passes along more traffic to its site than another; Companies should also determine the worth of those click-through visitors based on purchases (retailers) or page views (advertiser-supported sites).

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