Wildly Appropriate

Coremetrics Bigshot Blogs New CGM Company

Feb 5, 11:22 PM

One of the biggest names in bigtime eCommerce web analytics is a company called Coremetrics. Their client list reads like a who's who of online retail. Anyhow, I was following the scent of some other piece of information on customer generated media (CGM) when I stumbled across a posting by some former Coremetrics executive who's blogging about his new business venture. Immediately my scalp began to itch: web analytics is an insanely profitable and hot business to be in these days. Why the heck would you leave a top firm in such tops business conditions? Here's part of the answer:

...[A]fter leaving Coremetrics ...<snip>... I came across a Coremetrics client that had rolled out customer ratings and review functionality. I asked them if we could do some analysis of this new "website feature". What we learned was astonishing. Customers who read product reviews had a 92% higher conversion than those that didn’t! <snip> ... Being an analytically-driven guy, this was fascinating to me. Intuitively it made sense as we have been communicating about the pros and cons of products and services since the dawn of the early bazaars....

I'm intrigued to see what these guys at BazaarVoice do for their customers. All that Cathedrals and Bazaars stuff their name evokes is close to my heart as a lover of architecture and such.