Apologies for the several week delay between posting partner interviews, but I am pleased to share the following interview with John Squire, Chief Strategy Officer of Coremetrics. John has been quite busy recently, driving the launch of Connect and preparing for a major product release in May, but he took the time to share his outlook on a variety of industry issues. We welcome your comments and invite you to suggest questions and topics for future partner interviews by emailing partners@bazaarvoice.com.
1. It’s 2008. By now, every online business understands that without a web analytics solution, they are flying blind. That said, not all businesses are sophisticated users of web analytics. On average, how would you grade the industry overall?
I think it’s fair to say that most online business owners recognize that flying blind is far from ideal. Understanding an issue and actually working to overcome it are two entirely different activities. I would give the entire industry a C- overall. That said, there’s certainly a class of businesses that are far and away excelling at their use of web analytics.
2. What are companies doing extremely well?
Looking at the leaders in the field of using web analytics to manage their business, a casual observer would likely conclude the secret to their success is that they are actively and constantly monitoring the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of their web business. That’s a common trait among each of these, but what we’ve seen that separates the high performing companies from the distant followers is that their organizations truly embrace the notion of data driven decisions. I realize that is easy to say, but these companies look at both the macro trends of their business and constantly break down each KPI to understand the causal factors that drive those trends. From that, they build business models that describe how a % increase or decrease in those causal factors will impact the value created servicing their online visitors and customers. It isn’t easy! Businesses that lead in this area work hard to map their online and offline investments to their topline objectives: Sales, Leads Generated, Advertising Revenue Generated, Bookings, Applications, and the many metrics for Customer Satisfaction, Engagement, and Service.
3. What big opportunities are routinely being overlooked and why?
The odd thing about the online business is that there are so many articles, case studies, and books available on the best practices online businesses are deploying, that it can be daunting to know where to start. What I see is that many companies don’t start or don’t value the importance of constantly evaluating their business for improvement. I think there are two areas where a majority of business owners have huge opportunities:
