Case study: P&O Ferries

Though expensive, Speed-Trap saves P&O considerable amounts of money elsewhere

UK ferry operator P&O’s web site receives more than 700,000 unique visitors per month, and hosts up to 4,000 individual HTML pages at any one time.

Having used Webtrends analytics software to monitor performance and collate information about online customer activity for almost four years, the company replaced it with Speed-Trap’s customer insight technology in April 2008.

Speed-Trap allows P&O to make changes to its web pages more quickly and easily, because it requires only one piece of code to be deployed on every site, says Dan Acarnley, P&O Ferries’ direct marketing and e-commerce controller.

“The biggest drawback [with Webtrends] was that we had to do a lot of pre-configuration, and create a massive list of individual tags to our key performance indicator analytics processes, which had to be installed on the pages themselves,” he says. “This created an IT resource overhead and because those staff were working on other projects, it was difficult to get that resource allocated.”

If P&O wanted to view a certain information metric, it could take four to five months before it saw the data.

“If you look at WebTrends or Omniture’s Web analytics, they make definitions of what you see up front and create tags,” says. Acarnley. “But Speed-Trap does everything up front. If we import something in January but only decide we want to see a particular metric in August, all the information on those hits is available.”

While P&O initially trialled Speed-Trap as a fully hosted, managed platform, it has since moved everything in-house, running the software on its existing servers. It is now used throughout P&O’s e-commerce team, who were provided with formal training on using the dashboard and technical configuration.

Though expensive, Acarnley says Speed-Trap saves P&O considerable amounts of money elsewhere, and frees up internal IT staff for other projects.

“The cost in pounds was offset by the fact that we did not require a massive development effort to get Speed-Trap up and running, and in-house reporting configured the way we wanted – it was a relatively simple code deployment,” he said.

P&O does not yet use the advanced behavourial insight features already present in Speed-Trap, but says it is interested in exploring those capabilities in the long term.

“That will give us a deeper insight into our customer database, so we can link multiple sessions from the same users, get a much bigger, richer picture of booking phases, and get a better idea of how to respond with marketing and content,” said Acarnley.

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