Analytics

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks! Over the past few days we have been completing the transaction by which Foviance has acquired the business assets and brand of Applied Insights. I have joined Foviance as Director of Analytical Consulting and will be taking a seat on the Foviance Board. John is pursuing his own consultancy activities and will continue to work with us in the future. You can see the official press release here.

So what’s the background and what does all this mean?

Well, I’ve known the guys at Foviance for some time. We have and have had many common clients. Foviance is an excellent company and has a strong reputation in the market for customer experience consulting. They have been aware for some time that data, analytics and insight are critical to understanding the user experience and getting it right. The acquisition of an analytics consultancy like Applied Insights is a natural move in terms of developing the overall proposition. I’m delighted to be joining them and although it’s been less than a week, it feels good. One of the reasons why the fit with Foviance feels right is because we have common values and beliefs about what “good” looks like.

I’m heading up the analytics consulting team which is called Foviance Applied Insights. Maybe not a totally original name but “it does what it says on the tin”! In the team I will be bringing together the existing analytical capabilities of Foviance and Applied Insights and will be scaling and expanding our services over the coming months. In addition to Applied Insights core competencies in strategic analytics consulting, customer analytics, predictive analytics and optimisation we will be growing the existing capabilities within the Foviance team in web analytics consulting and developing our services around some of the core technologies out there such as Omniture, Google Analytics and others. It’s going to remain busy!

For me this is a really exciting move. With a core team in place and with the Foviance infrastructure behind us I’m looking forward to extending our capabilities, developing our ideas and continuing to offer quality consulting services and products. Look out for news either on this blog or on the main Foviance site.

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

London, UK, 6 November 2008 - Foviance, the expert in digital customer experience, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Applied Insights, a leading provider of analytical consulting solutions to blue chip businesses. The acquisition will accelerate the development of Foviance’s technology agnostic analytics division and supports Foviance’s strategy to provide a comprehensive customer experience solution to its global customer base.

The acquisition brings Applied Insight’s director and co-founder Neil Mason to the Foviance team as director of analytical consulting. With his vast experience, he will serve on Foviance’s board of directors and lead the company’s new initiative and analytical consulting practice. Mr. Mason is a renowned industry figure and brings Applied Insights best practices of predictive analytics, optimisation and measuring digital marketing effectiveness to Foviance. He also brings with him Applied Insights existing blue chip client base which includes Barclays, BP and Total Jobs and he will have a pivotal role in developing further Foviance’s strategic partners such as Omniture and Google.

Neil Mason joins Foviance with 25 years of in-depth industry experience in marketing analytics and strategy. Prior to founding Applied Insights, Mr. Mason has worked in a number of senior leadership roles for many major companies including QXL ricardo and Research International UK. He also currently serves on the board of directors of the Web Analytics Association, the global industry body for digital analytics professionals.

“The combination of Foviance’s expertise in delivering seamless cross-channel experiences with Applied Insight’s leadership in understanding data analytics, is ideal for our customers, both in providing innovative services and optimising usability and conversion rates” said Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance. “Our combined global customer base now has a partner with proven expertise to deliver a strong blend of business, analytical and technology consulting capabilities.”

“Many e-businesses are looking to improve their online performance but are not clear about what they should be measuring or how to measure it effectively, our merger with Foviance presents us with an incredible opportunity to improve the digital usability experience for businesses globally,” said Neil Mason, director of analytical consulting, Foviance.

About Foviance

Foviance is a leading customer experience consultancy that works globally with some of the world’s best known brands to deliver measurable improvements in performance. .

Founded in 2001 and with a heritage in website usability and data analytics, Foviance delivers consultancy to its clients about the effectiveness of their individual channels, such as mobile, web and call centre and how they combine in a cross-channel environment. For many clients, insight is provided not only in their home market, but also internationally through Foviance extensive alliance network.

Foviance engages with its customers wherever they are in their product lifecycle, and provides insight so they understand how to improve, create and deliver excellent customer experiences.

Foviance boasts 43 of the UK FTSE 100 companies among its client roster, including Barclays, BSkyB, and Sainsbury’s. In addition Foviance works with International brands such as Astra Zeneca, Dell and Nokia. For further information please visit: www.foviance.com

For further information:

Melanie Hesketh / Becky Cheers

Prompt Communications for Foviance

+44 208 8996 1638 / +44 208 8996 1636

Foviance@prompt-communications.com

Omniture, the online business optimisation specialist, recently announced that it had agreed to acquire search and merchandising assets from solutions provider Mercado.

Another day, another Omniture acquisition! How fun it is watching the leviathan consume all in its wake searching for the Holy Grail that is the perfect online business optimisation solution. Is this the final piece of the puzzle? If so, how will this fit in with the rest of the Omniture suite?

On the face of it, acquiring these central elements of Mercado’s business will allow Omniture to help its own customers market their products better. Online retailers are gaining a good deal of experience selling products and services, but they also want to be able to provide customers with pointers towards related products that best marry with their purchases.

Merchandising in this sense is an effective way of collaborating products together. Mercado’s technology will allow Omniture to record sales details, receptiveness to merchandising, track and compare customer data from external search with internal searches, and manage keyword and pay-per-click campaigns dynamically. The concept of merchandising is not just about collecting information about what customers look at in terms of site design, it is about analysing pure product focus information - what is hot and what is not?

Of course collecting data across online channels is one thing, but refining businesses based upon the information collected is more of a challenge. One of Omniture’s more interesting acquisitions of late was web optimisation company Offermatica. This flagged Omniture’s intent of moving from its analytical routes to something much more ambitious, a completely automated online business optimisation solution.

Test & Target, as it is now known to Omniture customers, provides the ability to conduct real-time multivariate testing - an extremely powerful tool that could provide the answer to what combination of content drives customers the most. But here’s the flaw; what happens if all the permutations Test & Target displays are bad? Just because ‘Layout A’ has the highest conversion rate does not mean it is the most you can achieve, maybe it is the information itself and not the means by which it is displayed. What if there was a means of determining the best content to serve on products to push?

Enter Mercado’s merchandising technology.

Merchandising encourages commercial activity via the promotion of content. This process involves analysing sources of data to determine which content sells and what doesn’t. Quite simply, Omniture is attempting to come up with an automated merchandising solution that analyses data sources and serving product/services information directly into Omniture Publish (online CMS system) via Omniture’s Test & Target.

Omniture started life as a highly-effective statistical reporting company. By acquiring new tools like Offermatica & Mercado, the Omniture suite is another step closer to delivering a fully automated online optimisation tool. The benefit of which will be the most powerful tool on the market giving businesses a ’switch to flick’, kick-starting a self-learning tool that will automatically increase the likelihood of turning visitors into a customers.

Google Analytics came out shouting “We are coming to get you” at the big 3 vendors (Oct 22nd) with the announcement of its new enterprise class features due to be released in the next coming weeks. Advanced Segmentation, custom reporting, a data export API and the long awaited integration with AdSense all feature on the list to really add some serious weight to the GA offering.

After IndexTools was acquired by Yahoo! and they announced that they would join Google in the “free tool” market space, we have been watching with eager eyes to see how Google would raise their game and from what we have seen so far it is a big improvement. The big win for most analysts will be the new Advanced Segmentation feature, which enables you to create your own dynamic custom segments based on multiple dimensions and/or metrics so you can properly slice and dice your data as you want it. Say goodbye to fixed dimensions and multiple profile settings and filters. If you want to find out more, Avinash Kaushik has written a great post teaching you how to become a segmentation ninja. Google Analytics Releases Advanced Segmentation: Now Be A Ninja!

Custom reporting is also another big benefit with a drag and drop interface similar to that of IndexTools allowing you to choose the dimensions and metrics which you want to see in your report. Concerns over data privacy will also be put to rest with the introduction of a data export API, giving users more transparency over the data which Google holds. There is also some new eye candy for all you marketers out there with a funky motion chart to give a new twist to data visualisation.

Some of the features such as AdSense integration are still in private beta for the moment, but I can’t wait to get stuck in. Mamma’s got a brand new toy to play with!

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

When we think about how to evaluate a predictive model the first thing we typically think of is how accurately does that model predict against the (unseen) test data. More often than not though when we develop models our business/research customers want more than that. They want to know how the algorithm got to the predictions i.e. they want to understand the model.

The more transparent predictive methods don’t just predict they also reveal the patterns that underlie them. The two main benefits of this are that

1. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) typically on the business/research side - can assess the model’s validity by viewing these patterns, for example as rules or formulae. This way they can see if the inherent relationships make sense. Do they see any potential anomalies in the data that we didn’t pick up when we previously explored it?
2. And of course the patterns themselves may reveal useful insights. We often find specific segments of interest; demographic groups who have a higher propensity to convert through a given channel, or re-purchasers who have short, but potentially interesting and valuable, buying cycles.

The bottom line is that when we can see what a model is doing we can glean much more from it than the likelihood that the outcome of interest (convert, attrite, default, etc.) will happen.

To be frank most of our projects are like this. This is where Decision Tree methods often win out because the output let’s us visually explore the data to both understand the model and to examine other potential patterns of interest. They may not necessarily give us the most accurate predictions but often the SMEs care more about understanding than predicting. This is a classic trade-off in PA.

There are exceptions to this. The alternative view is that accuracy is paramount and it could be that the winning model is opaque. Neural Network models are a case in point. Depending on the software you are using you might see a ranked list of fields which contribute to the prediction along with the prediction itself and perhaps an associated confidence level. Even if the final network is displayed it doesn’t necessarily explain much more.

For the most part these are the two most typical scenarios however we are currently designing a 3^rd type - where opaqueness is the main objective (together with an acceptable level of predictive accuracy of course). We’re talking to a government department who don’t want to have to send sensitive data out and who don’t want our models to reveal any of that information either. So the gist of our approach is that we’ll develop black-box models on our data and let them deploy them on their database. They’ll give us addresses and predictive scores in return but in so doing we won’t know why a particular address was selected.

Anyone living in the UK will understand the political backdrop to this as there have been various high profile cases of data going AWOL (here is the latest one). We are hoping that a somewhat unorthodox application of Predictive Analytics might help the UK government provide a valuable public service without further compromising the confidentiality of its citizens. There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip mind you - we’ll keep you posted…

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

Applied Insights have launched themselves into the 21^st century and have set up a YouTube channel. You can find it here:

www.youtube.com/appliedinsights

So far we have some video blogs up there from the recent Emetrics conferences in San Francisco and London. Over time we will be adding to that with discussions and video seminars on various topics to do with digital marketing and predictive analytics, or even digital marketing predictive analytics!

Here’s a sample which is Neil catching up with Avinash Kaushik towards the end of Emetrics San Francisco 2008.

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

Last week I went to the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit in San Francisco. You can read about my impressions of the conference over at my column at ClickZ and also watch a series of video blogs over at the Applied Insights channel on YouTube.

This post originally appeared on Applied Insights’ blog. Foviance acquired Applied Insights in November 2008, with Neil Mason joining us as Director of Analytical Consulting. As part of this acquisition, we’ve incorporated Applied Insights’ blog into our own.

The answer is probably yes. There, that was easy enough.

But then it gets a bit trickier, the questions start piling up. Like:

• What would a European WAA look like?
• How would it be organised?
• How would it work (or not) along side the existing WAA?
• What kind of legal status would it take?
• How would it be funded?

And probably a whole lot more that I haven’t thought of yet.

I have to declare an interest here. As a Board member on the Web Analytics Association, my responsibility is for “International”. I think last year was the first year that a Director on the Board had responsibility for “International”, though there has always been an International Committee ably co-chaired by Vicky Brock and Steve Jackson. Vicky, Steve and others have done a great job over the years helping to get activity happening at the local level in markets around the world. When I came onto the Board a year ago I agreed with Steve and Vicky that our priorities should be to continue to expand our international reach and also to look for ways to deliver more value to our international members.

A year on, have we done as much as we would have liked? Probably not. We are all volunteers, doing this is our own time. Most of us run our own businesses but I’m amazed at the amount of time that people do put in around the world on a volunteer basis.

Have we made any progress? Yes, we have. We have a new structure in place on the International Committee that should allow us to expand without losing focus and coordination. We have expanded into new markets by appointing country managers in places such as France, Spain, Russia, Argentina and Brazil. We are looking at how we can expand our activities into Asia. We are working on the structures and processes which will enable us to better help volunteer activity on the ground.

Could we be doing more? Absolutely. And it is a real case of “many hands making light work”. We need people to step up to the plate and get involved. I know it can be frustrating that sometimes we don’t seem to react in real time but as I said before that as a volunteer organisation it can take time to have the meetings, make the calls, to come to the decisions.

So back to the question? Does Europe need its own WAA? The answer is still “probably” but, the reality is that at this moment in time I don’t know. There is no doubt that International representation is getting stronger within the WAA. In 2006 there were no European Directors on the Board, in 2007 there were two. In 2008 hopefully more! As someone who spent many years working in the European divisions of US companies, I am well aware of the frustrations that can cause! I do think though that the WAA is becoming more internationally orientated and this debate about a European WAA is a great one to have. For me the next step is to work out how we get to the point of decision. There’s a lot of work to be done finding out what’s the best thing to do and how best to do it. We’ll be kicking that process off in San Francisco next week. After that I am sure we will be looking for all the help we can get! If you’re interested in helping out with the International activities and development of the WAA, let me know.