It was in the mid-1990s when I had my first taste of actionable web analytics. I was working for a telecommunications company that offered a Voice over IP solution (VoIP) and I was part of the team that tracked banner placements on websites like Excite, Yahoo, and AltaVista. I will never forget the cartoonish banner that consistently beat out every other banner ever produced. It was counterintuitive, but that alone isn’t what excited me. Here we were in the mid-90s and this company’s web team was able to tell you exactly how many minutes of phone calls were made to Guatemala as a result of banners placed on a particular keyword. They were even able to predict how many people would call Russia after they downloaded the VoIP software from the sports pages on Yahoo. These were the metrics that drove the media buys and placement decisions week after week. This was my web analytics reality and so it set my expectations.

After that, I started working with a startup, a specialty retailer. When I began working with them, I was shocked at how little people were tracking. Not that they didn’t have metrics but they weren’t the type of metrics you could make decisions and take action on. This is still, sadly, the reality for far too many companies today. While today so many companies have sophisticated analytics installed to measure web activity, the organization and planning of their measurement is still poor and the ability to take action on that data is still minimal.

I would like to share just some of what just a handful of companies are doing with their insights today in the hope it will inspire you to analytics greatness.

One of the companies I know, a multi-channel retailer, provides regular reports to their physical store managers of the browsing history from visitors who are geographically located near the store. The reports are not so impressive; it’s the action they drive that impresses me. These store managers often rearrange in-store displays to promote the items visitors are viewing the most online.

You can do a similar thing even if you are an online-only retailer. You could easily change home page, search results, and category promotions based on geo-location data and visitor browsing history. Imagine you are a home goods and hardware retailer and you begin to see an increase in searches for shovels and snow blowers from the Boston area because the weather forecast shows a winter storm coming. If you were a multi-channel retailer, your Boston store would put shovels, melting salt, and snow blowers on prominent display, while your Miami store might still be showing garden hoses prominently. Online you can use segmentation and personalization tools like BTBuckets (which is free) to swap out your promotions for geo-targeted traffic from Boston to see your winter storm promotion. Enterprise tools like Monetate can even leverage built-in capabilities to target geo-location traffic based on local weather or weather forecasts.

Another similar multi-channel retailer collects and analyzes in-store scans of their product shelf tags by cellphones and uses that data to change end-cap displays based on scanning popularity. They can also take that same scanning data and change website promotions to mirror the popular products in those locations for website visitors.

I know several other companies that are monitoring product reviews and changing their local inventory based on how positive and negative reviews are. Again, you can use business rules to change your website behavior and target visitors based on all of these fantastic data points.

Another simple geo-personalization tactic you can use is custom messaging international visitors. It can be as simple as displaying the fact that you ship to the visitors’ countries to changing tag lines or promotions to be localized. Monetate has found that across its significant client base when it personalized experiences based on international visitors’ geo-location, it improved conversion rates by as much as 100 percent.

Are you already using geo-location data to your advantage? If you are, please share how you are using the data with our readers. If not, then can you afford not to take advantage of the geo-personalization opportunity?

“We keep giving up privacy for the sake of convenience,” was a buzz-worthy quote from my Future Shopper keynote presentation at Gulltaggen 2011 in Oslo last week.

Some were uncomfortable about approaching a “Minority Report”-like state where ads are contextually-targeted advertising based on location, tastes, and past history. I quoted former Google CEO Eric Schmidt from his IFA keynote where he said “We can suggest what you should do next, what you care about. Imagine: We know where you are, we know what you like.”

I’ll ask you, just like I asked the audience; how many would love to have the day when they receive an alert from their refrigerator on their cellphone that they are running low on milk when they pass their local grocery store? Almost every hand in the Oslo Spektrum went up to welcome this comfort, but there were those who felt this might be going too far. This is, of course, quite understandable. The issue of privacy and personal information is not a new one; in fact, you can see discussion of these issues as early as the 1880s to 1890s.

As this clever blog post points out about privacy concerns from Paris in 1888 about a new social-networking society newspaper where people volunteer information about themselves. “The Right to Privacy ” was published by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 in response to recent technological developments, such as photography, and sensationalist journalism, also known as yellow journalism. Warren and Brandeis declared that information which was previously hidden and private could now be “shouted from the rooftops.”

What your notion of privacy is will most likely be quite different than our parent’s generation and there is no doubt that it is already quite different for the under 21 crowd today, and it will be different for our children’s children tomorrow.

Look at What People Do, Not What They Say

Do you also remember a study by a greeting card website in the mid ’90s that found out that over 95 percent of people said they were concerned about their privacy online, yet only about half a percent of them ever looked for a company’s privacy policy? Let’s not forget that one peek at our Google search history Dashboard will reveal that Google knows more about you than your therapist or spouse. Facebook knows when your relationship is in trouble before anyone else does.

So we make a lot of noise, even pass privacy legislation, but they are hard to act on. In fact, one person I met at the conference who represents an ad retargeting company had little concern about any of the EU regulations, as they didn’t have much teeth in their bite and it would be years until anything actionable came from them. These regulations are mostly the product of the older generation fighting the natural trend of this younger generation being more open to sharing then they are comfortable with.

Have you already given up some of your privacy for the sake of convenience? Will you continue to?

If you couldn’t join us last Wednesday, you can join us with this recorded version of Recession Marketing: Pre-Click to Post-Click. Join Craig Danuloff, from ClickEquations and David Brussin from Monetate as we explore using personas to create better pay per click or paid search ads and a better persona-lized experience all the way to conversion.

Click here to view the embedded video.