BI in Action

If you have or your company has a Web site, there's probably someplace within it where you ask people to do something - register, purchase something, or otherwise provide information or engage in a transaction. So there's a key metric of business intelligence that you're probably not even tracking effectively, let alone taking any significant steps to improve: abandonment, or the percentage of visitors who disengage from or flee the site before completing their response to your request.

Now, reducing abandonment is intuitively a good thing, but it raises two fundamental questions - how to track abandonment rates, and what to do to reduce them. Those two questions now have new answers, thanks to SeeWhy Software, a company focused on real-time analytics designed to convert abandoners into registrants and/or purchasers. (You may recall that I gently took SeeWhy to task - and received cogent and thoughtful comments from the company's founder Charles Nicholls - in response, last month in this very space.)

SeeWhy has introduced Abandonment Tracker Free, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution designed to help Web site operators capture information about abandonment, and to convert up to 30 percent of those who abandoners. SeeWhy surveys indicate that while more than 90 percent of Web site operators want to follow up with abandoners to try to convert them, only 9 percent do so within 24 hours, and only 17 percent do so at all. Given that shopping cart abandonment rates are nearly 50 percent for many companies, abandonment can cost Web site operators up to $10 per second, according to SeeWhy.

So let's review. There is now available from SeeWhy a free, SaaS-based solution at least as easy to use as, say, Google Analytics. Abandonment Tracker Free will not only provide complementary analysis, but help your company to recover up to 30 percent of abandoned revenue-generating transactions. And it offers a painless upgrade path to Abandonment Tracker Pro, a fee-based offering that provides even more analysis, follow-up, and conversion capabilities, including real-time initial follow-up.

If there's a downside, I don't see it. If your company operates a Web site that sells or offers anything, your company ought to register for and begin using Abandonment Tracker Free today. I'm pretty convinced it will "pay" for itself within hours, if not days, especially given its aggressive pricing - free. (That should generate ROI high and clear enough that even a CFO should be able to understand it without to many PowerPoint slides, as I like to say.)

SeeWhy's Nicholls told me that the company is considering a number of pricing models for Abandonment Tracker Pro, including charging a percentage of abandonment conversion revenues. SeeWhy is also looking at ways to help other solution providers incorporate Abandonment Tracker features into those other solutions. (The company also just closed another $4.5 million in funding, giving its leaders even more about which to think.) But you don't have to wait for any of that to begin, as SeeWhy likes to say, "converting clicks into customers." And if that's not a goal you can "sell" to your IT and business decision-makers, then you and your intended intelligent business may have larger issues than Web site abandonment to consider...