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Last week at the Conversion Conference in San Francisco I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Davenport. Tom, is a Babson College Distinguished Professor, and research/faculty leader and co-founder of International Institute for Analytics.

I blogged last week on his keynote to the conference. In the video interview below, I ask Tom specifically how we can apply his thinking to ecommerce and web analytics.

Some key takeouts from this interview:

• If you’re an analyst, it may be easier to move to a different employer than struggle to make analytics relevant to your organization
• Companies that compete on analytics often look to hire-in analytically oriented talent when building teams
• More data in ecommerce means that there’s enormous scope to get competitive advantage from your data
• Many ecommerce companies are still struggling to make web analytics actionable
• The average number of web analysts per company is 0.25 full time equivalents

In the interview I referenced some SeeWhy Research titled “The Lessons Learned From The Top 10 Converting Websites.” You can download a copy of this research here

Do you agree with Tom? Let us know your thoughts below. Please also let me know whether video blogs of this sort are useful. Thanks in advance!

The code to embed this video on your site can be found here. Click on the ‘Share’ tab to  copy the embed code, and the ‘Details’ tab to download a copy. (…)

Recovering abandoned shopping carts and web forms is a lucrative business. On average 70 percent of shopping carts and 56 percent of web forms are abandoned before completion. In an effort to win these customers back, retailers employ email remarketing campaigns that should recover on average between 10 and 30 percent of abandoners. That translates directly into significant incremental revenues.

When it comes to email remarketing, one question that I get asked fairly regularly is about what is needed to ensure compliance with CAN-SPAM in the U.S. and the European Privacy Directive in Europe when setting up a remarketing campaign. The situation is really straightforward in the U.S. (it comes down to little more than checking your privacy policy), but it is slightly more complicated in Europe.

As a result, we engaged Ruth Boardman, a partner at Bird and Bird LLP, and one of the world’s leading electronic data privacy experts. Ruth and I co-authored a white paper on email remarketing compliance that covers this subject in more depth, and additionally, we recorded a webcast titled Email Remarketing and Compliance (in the U.S. and European Union).

For this blog, we’ll focus exclusively on the U.S., and I’ll write about compliance in the European Union separately. (…)

When customers make purchases online, on average 3 out of every 10 that start the shopping cart process go all the way to complete the purchase. Seven out of 10 don’t and abandon the shopping cart. Shopping cart processes require visitors to fill in a form, submit personal details and click buttons. It’s a logical and completely rational process—at least to the ecommerce site.

But most buyers do not make purchases based solely on logic. This is where emotion comes in to play. Emotion is probably the single most important, and least understood, factor which makes the difference between a sale and a shopping cart abandonment.

Last week I caught up with Patrick Bultema, CEO of Codebaby, at the Conversion Conference. In the video interview below, I asked him about the ‘moments of truth’ that online visitors have when making purchases, and the critical role that emotion plays in many online purchases and shopping cart abandonment.

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Lessons learned from Cyber Monday shopping trends 2009Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are fast approaching, and customers know this just as well as retailers. Based on last year, between Labor Day and mid-November we can expect online customers to change their behavior by deferring purchases. As an industry, we have conditioned our customers to expect exceptional offers in the run up to Black Friday.

IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics stifles innovation in the web analytics market. Worse, other big deals are contributing to the trend, e.g., Adobe’s purchase of Omniture and ATG’s purchase of Webtrends. Okay, the ATG Webtrends deal hasn’t happened yet, but it could.

The problem is that acquired companies find it very difficult to innovate. Their attention and effort is now focused on integration with the acquiring company rather than innovation within their product lines. That problem is then compounded by an exodus of talent. Young, energetic, entrepreneurial people don’t necessarily want to work for the acquiring company, so they leave.

The next logical innovation for Coremetrics – and Omniture, for that matter – would be a move to real time analytics, with the aim of optimizing the experience of individual visitors’ and increasing conversions. Coremetrics has already made some moves to update its dashboards more frequently, but displaying data faster is only a small part of the answer.

Traditional web analytics are vendors who are still too focused on reporting. (…)