Lately, we’ve been using several great examples of how online trends develop quickly and then diminish just as fast, requiring e-commerce retailers and website operators to have the tools to both identify and act upon those trends in minutes, not weeks. You can watch our CEO, Brian Kelly, talk about some of these trends in this short video.

One of the examples that Brian covers is the J. Crew / Michelle Obama story, where the First Lady wore a J. Crew outfit on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and then sales exploded. It’s a great example of how a trend can come out of nowhere, and how companies need to quickly react. And, it’s such a good example that it was covered by US News, Time, The NY Daily News, and The Huffington Post, among others.

But, a recent post in Slate, titled “There Is No Michelle Effect,” asserts that J. Crew did not benefit at all from the Michelle Obama connection, and that JP Morgan listed the “Michelle Obama Bounce” as one of the big myths of the year, right up there with the Easter Bunny! They go on to note that J. Crew’s CEO even mentioned Mrs. Obama in a November earnings call, saying that she had no effect on same store sales.

First, I should mention that November was waaaay before Mrs. Obama’s Jay Leno appearance, and even several months prior to the Obama children wearing J. Crew at the inauguration. But, let’s not lose focus. The focus should be on J. Crew’s ability to quickly understand, exploit, or debunk any perceived trend.

Was there a bounce and they missed it? Did they have the behavioral analytics in place to see the effect in the days after the Jay Leno appearance? Or, did they quickly jump on their online and POS data and see that there really was not a material jump in sales?

The point is that companies need the ability to quickly identify potential trends, then either quickly convert them into more traffic, more dollars, and more profits, or quickly determine that there is no monetizable trend and move on.

In either case, companies can no longer afford to wait weeks or even days for their analysis. In today’s world, you need analytics that can give you answers, actionable patterns, and decisions in minutes.

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“Business time” means getting the right information quickly enough to add value now. On the web, data from last quarter is a lifetime ago with respect to visitor behavior. So, companies need to get their hands on key behavior patterns now, even at the deepest levels. They need to answer questions like:

• What are the key differences between first time and repeat visitors?
• What are the characteristics of high-volume visitors?
• What’s the difference between urban vs. rural visitors? In California vs. Pennsylvania? At night vs. the afternoon?

Having access to online data is one thing – and everyone has it via their existing web analytics tool. However, having the ability to find patterns in visitor behavior, uncover novel and unforeseen segmentations, and do it across any combination of attributes, over tens (or hundreds!) of millions of rows of clickstream data, and do it before you go to lunch is another thing.

Here’s a great article on how you can answer these questions in “business time,” giving you what you need to make an impact today vs. giving up on the time or hassle of trying to do it with your current tools. The time it takes to get such value today is causing you to avoid asking the far more difficult questions – and timely answers to those questions could make a real difference to getting, keeping, and growing your visitors, transactions, and revenues!

With this new ability, you can now quickly understand of how visitors respond over multiple visits, over varied content, and across any time span. Here are just a few examples of where this new value can be applied:

• Understand which combination of online offers increase conversion rates. For example, analysts at an e-commerce website are identifying which offers to present to which customers over one or more visits to make them more likely to purchase.
• Identify content affinities over multiple page views or multiple visits.
• Recognize the sequence of events that lead to and follow the purchase of specific items.
• Quantify both the direct and indirect lift generated by multiple promotions.

Check our video for more details, and be sure to let us know what you think with a comment below or an email to info@quantivo.com.