Voice of Experience: Terry Lund, Eastman Kodak Co.

Terry Lund
Director, Site Operations and B2B Commerce
Eastman Kodak Co.
Rochester, New York
www.kodak.com

Manager’s Profile: Lund has spent his career investigating the mysteries of science. He spent 14 years as a researcher with the nuclear physics lab at the University of Rochester, before moving across town to join the research department at Kodak. In 1994, he took charge of the company’s Internet presence.

His Responsibility: Lund handles the day-to-day operations of the company’s Internet site, Kodak.com. The site receives more than 150,000 unique visitors per day, and contains close to 80,000 pages of content aimed at such varied users as consumers, photo lab operators, motion picture technicians, and health and dental imaging specialists.

What He’s Analyzing: Kodak has been using software from Accrue since 1996 to analyze its Web traffic. The software provides a lot of good basic information, such as total number of visitors, where they’re coming from, what pages are being visited most and for how long. It also can tell Lund if banner ad or cross-media promotions are translating into Web sales.

Where the software falls short: Lund would like to know more about his users, right down to their individual identities. But the only way to do that at present is by getting them to register. There is also no way for Lund to analyze traffic on mirror sites of Kodak content, maintained by companies like AOL or Akamai. “It’s a huge issue for us and others—if you’re only measuring the traffic on your Web site, you’re missing a big part of the overall picture,” he says.

What’s Next: Lund would like to be able to tie together the information he is gaining from his Web analytics software with other sources of demographic data to develop a more complete picture of his customers.

His Advice: Before you begin measuring and analyzing Web traffic, take time to think about how to define success. For example, are you trying to generate traffic for awareness, increase Web sales, or sign up people for a newsletter? “It sounds like business principles 101, but it’s a constant source of frustration. The software isn’t clairvoyant.”