Know how much traffic your site gets? Many private equity firms don’t.
May 15th, 2009It’s no secret the power and benefit of not only knowing how much internet traffic your website receives, but also how people got there, how long they stay, and what content they find most interesting.
While knowing traffic figures may not alter a private equity firm’s web strategy - (essentially just having a website), it is somewhat surprising that many firms don’t track at all. Tracking site visitors doesn’t cost anything (Google Analytics seems to be the most popular), and is no more difficult than having your web admin insert a little chunk of code into the site footer.
So which firms don’t seem to care? Checking for tracking code on a short list of websites yields a few notables . . .
| Firm | |
|---|---|
| Abry Partners | surprising given recent re-design and emphasis on media/communications opportunities |
| not too surprising given stagnant site | |
| The Gores Group | |
| First Reserve | |
| HIG | |
| The Blackstone Group | somewhat shocking |
So which firms do care (or at least have an IT person who cared to set it up)? Well many do. KKR, Francisco Partners, CD&R, Carlyle, Candover,
Cinven, Summit Partners, all track, but one surprise is Cerberus.
Cerberus doesn’t seem to care about keeping an up to date web presence - their last news update is still from ‘07, yet they do have Google Analytics set-up. Now if Cerberus actually checks is another story.
Whether private equity firms as a whole track their web traffic more or less than then rest of the internet population would need a more detailed survey. My guess is significantly less. The quick survey above only checked mega sized firms. Sampling several small firms yields even fewer . . .
Tags: Abry Partners, Blackstone Group, Candover, Carlyle, CD&R, Cinven, Francisco Partners, HIG, KKR, Private Equity Traffic, Summit Partners, TA Associates
July 2nd, 2009 at 12:28 pm
In my experience, venture capital firms are MUCH more tech-savvy and conscious of their internet image than the bigger buyout firms. Mostly, the buyout giants care that their investors and potential LP’s can easily access their information. Venture capital, on the other hand, is a very technology-based industry and reached its height during the dot-com era, so it’s no surprise that VC’s care about who visits their sites and who they are reaching. I would think more mid-market private equity firms would utilize the internet to attract potential investors, because they are in need of an edge on the bigger PE firms.
Theo O’Brien
http://PrivateEquityBlogger.com