GHD sells hair straighteners, hairstyling accessories and finishing products around the world, and has an annual turnover of more than £100m.

Much of the company’s rapid growth from a humble UK startup in 2001 has been down to its ability to analyse customers’ online behaviour to maximise the impact of promotions and marketing campaigns, says GHD internet solutions manager Spencer Hudson.

Having previously used various combinations of traditional web analytics packages and in-house applications for this purpose, GHD installed a new analytics application from Speed-Trap around 12 months ago following a six-month consultation.

Speed-Trap uses Web 2.0 technology to analyse interaction at the user interface to provide real-time data on visitors.

“The previous system, Hitbox [now Omniture] was not accurate enough, and its ability to change with the business was very limited,” says Hudson. “The manual tagging required to deal with certain queries or theories was considerable and we had to use a log file system to log in and review what was happening.”

The Speed-Trap software records and monitors a much wider variety of data from people accessing the GHD web site from any device, providing information on the browser in use, the pages and sites they previously visited, and so on.

“It helps us to understand what is happening on the site, so we can accurately forecast what is going to happen in the future,” says Hudson. “So we know that if we spend ‘x’ amount on marketing, we can predict the exact revenue that will bring; run that promotion for that month and convert sales at this rate, for example.”

Since Speed Trap was installed, the company estimates that unit sales on ghdhair.com have increased by 178 per cent, with visitor numbers up 57 per cent and average site conversion (visits to sales) up from 1.65 to 2.65 per cent.

GHD is also looking at ways it can better use Speed-Trap to analyse the way its customers access multimedia content, including Flash-based graphics and video.

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