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REAL WORLD Applebee’s, Travelocity,
and Others: Data Mining for
CASE Business Decisions
increase conversion rates (the percentage of online visitors ness card. The test showed that the new upload path had the
who become customers), find out why visitors left the site, same conversion rate as the control version. “We were a lit-
and determine the exact point where users were dropping off. tle disappointed because we put in a lot of time to improve
The search first identified two vendor camps. One group this flow,” he adds.
offered tools that analyzed all available data, without any up- When the company added Visual Site to the operation,
front aggregation. The other offered tools that aggregated it found that although the test version was better than the
everything upfront but required users to foresee all the que- control in three out of four pages, the last page had a big
ries they wanted to run, Malone says. “If you have a question drop-off rate. “We were able to tell the usability team
that falls outside the set of questions you aggregated the data where the problem was,” Malone says. VistaPrint also re-
for, you have to reprocess the entire data set.” duced the drop-offs from its sign-in page after the Visual
The company finally turned to a third option, selecting Site tool showed that returning customers were using the
the Visual Site application from Visual Sciences Inc. Visual new customer-registration process and getting an error no-
Site uses a sampling method, which means VistaPrint can tice. The company fixed the problem, and “the sign-in rate
still query the detailed data. but “it is also fast because you’re improved significantly and led to higher conversions,” he
getting responses as soon as you ask a question. It queries says. While Malone concedes that it is hard to measure an
through 1% of the data you have, and based on that . . . it exact return on the investment, the company estimates that
gives you an answer back. It assumes the rest of the 99% [of the tool paid for itself several months after installation.
the data] looks like that. Because the data has been rand-
omized, that is a valid assumption,” notes Malone. Source: Adapted from Heather Havenstein, “Use Web Analytics to Turn
VistaPrint, which has been using the tool for just over a Online Visitors into Paying Customers,” Computerworld, September 17, 2007;
year, runs it alongside the 30–40 new features it tests every Mary Hayes Weier, “Applebee’s Exec Preaches Data Mining for Business
Decisions,” InformationWeek, October 8, 2007; and Heather Havenstein,
three weeks. For example, the company was testing a four- “Travelocity.com Dives into Text Analytics to Boost Customer Service,”
page path for a user to upload data to be printed on a busi- Computerworld, November 14, 2007.