This weekend I held an initial gathering for the meetup group that I recently started. The goal of LA Web Ventures is to provide a venue for Los Angeles web entrepreneurs to network with and learn from others who have launched successful entrepreneurial ventures online.

The meeting was hosted by CitrusByte, a high end web application development agency that operates out of a 4000 square foot mini-mansion. I was happy to find that the group was made up of a diverse range of friendly people with equally diverse backgrounds, for example:

• She owns a growing party planning website (and brought along her publicist)
• He works as an Apple engineer - and has great ideas on how to provide useful information from mining and compiling overlooked customer data within companies
• He is a QuickBooks Counselor, representing a local SBDC (small business development center)
• He works for Experian Marketing Services, helping fortune 500 companies with their email marketing programs

Since this was a first meetup, the discussion was kept open and free flowing. We began talking about the importance of the “little things” that you can uncover in your analytics and quickly dove into a discussion on shopping cart abandonment. It was brought up that re-engaging lost site visitors via email or other mechanisms can be a great tactic for increasing the overall conversion rate of just about any website. A few tools were mentioned, which I am gathering the links for and will post soon.

Some of the tools and platforms that were mentioned in the discussion:

• Google Analytics - free website analytics platform
• FeedBurner - RSS (and other seemingly un-trackable) channel analytics and promotional tool
• SpyFu - competitive analysis tool
• iContact - email marketing and surveying platform

Afterward, CitrusByte held a barbecue which brought in people from all corners of the interactive space and went on well into the night.