Predictive Analytics

Los Angeles - Marketing services company Connexity Inc. has acquired the PriceGrabber retail lead generation platform and network. The company will provide shopping leads that result in more than $2 billion in annual sales for retailers and brands.

PriceGrabber's shopping-focused publisher network offers more than 2,000 retailers marketing access to tens of millions of shoppers each month from online shopping destinations such as Yahoo!, Ask.com and PriceGrabber.com. Retailers will manage a single lead channel.

Armonk, N.Y. — Retailers looking ahead to meeting the needs of holiday shoppers should be aware of the continuing growth of mobile’s importance as a consumer channel. According to IBM’s Eighth Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, mobile accounted for 23% of sales and 45% of traffic in November and December 2014, respectively.

The nationwide expansion of the Facebook Place Tips in-store mobile promotion service, complete with free proprietary Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, was interesting news.  Here are three implications of Facebook’s latest effort to serve as a commercial platform:

Boston – The in-store customer experience is going to get a lot more personalized and timely. According to a new special report by Boston Retail Partners (BRP), “Real-time Retail – The New Retail Imperative,” by 2020 nearly two-thirds of retailers will identify a customer when they walk in the store via their smartphone.  In addition, 76% of retailers plan to provide suggested selling based on a customer’s previous purchases within three years.

Other key findings gathered from recent BRP surveys include:

New York — Online traffic rose 18% in the first quarter, according to Demandware's latest  Shopping Index. The study also reveals that the duration of mobile shopping visits decreased 43% in the first quarter, down to 8.4 minutes. Overall shopping episodes were also down 31% to 8.9 minutes.  

E-commerce traffic increased 18% in the first quarter, according to the latest Shopping Index from Demandware.

The report measures digital commerce growth and identifies the trends driving that growth based on analysis of same site activity over time. The latest Demandware Shopping Index reveals that shopper attraction, which measures the number of shoppers, was up 18% in the first quarter of 2015 over the first quarter last year and drove 83% of the digital commerce growth.

London, U.K. — Honest Cafe, an automated coffee house chain in London, is using IBM Watson Analytics to unearth client insights to help determine everything from coffee products and pricing, to marketing and promotions. Honest Cafe is a new venture from Revive Vending where three cafes currently in operation, and four more planned, are all unmanned.

New York — Internet ad revenues hit a record-breaking $13.3 billion in the United States in the first quarter of 2015, up 16% over the year-ago period, according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report figures released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and  PwC US.