Maybe you missed the big news (4/9/2012) of the Instagram acquisition by Facebook for a billion dollars.

Perhaps Facebook has a plan and a strategy – but so far, public opinion hasn’t been, shall we say, enthusiastic.  Check out this headline in Forbes:

Honestly it’s pretty difficult to wrap your head around spending a billion dollars for a company that has 13 employees, is less than 2 years old, and has zero revenue.  That’s right, in spite of having 30 million users, Instagram has no revenue, and let alone profitable revenue.

Perhaps in the Facebook pre-IPO world, the world where Instagram represents a real threat to a $137 billion valuation, an Instagram acquisition represents a great insurance policy.

But more than likely you live in a world where your business needs to generate revenue and profit.  If you are spending significant dollars getting people to your ecommerce site and doing a good job getting people to put items into a shopping cart, doesn’t it make sense to do what you can to improve the rate that they actually purchase those items?

You bet!  But according to an industry report by Coremetrics, the percentage of items in a shopping cart that are purchased isn’t very impressive.

If you are seeing results similar to those above, are you satisfied because you are within the industry averages?  If not, take a look at the Spring Metrics Smart Offers Page.  By understanding who is coming to your site and what you can do to target their buying behavior, you can increase your conversion rate and your revenue. You can influence shoppers in real time to proceed through the checkout with their carts, closing the sale BEFORE it becomes an abandoned cart.

You don’t have to be average.