Predictive Analytics

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com and is republished here with permission.

As I write this I’m on my way back to the UK from the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation summit in San Francisco. After three days and having watched about 15 presentations this is probably the first chance I have had to reflect on what I’ve seen and what I have learned. The first thing that strikes me was the breadth of content that was covered. I went to presentations ranging from the “emetrics ecosystem” to usability and from testing and experimentation to social media measurement. The second thing that stuck me was the quality of the material and the presenters. In a show like this it’s possible to hit a duff presentation or two but looking back at my notes, all the sessions I attended were spot on.

So what did I take out of the conference? One theme that came through was there was a lot more evidence of organisations using integrated measurement strategies than I have seen before. More organisations were showing how they use a wide array of tools and techniques to understand the effectiveness of their digital marketing programmes. Voice of the Customer methodologies such as onsite feedback and surveys are the norm, most people are using testing and experimentation approaches and the use data mining and predictive analytical techniques is on the increase. Text mining tools are being used on verbatim comments from onsite surveys to extract the core essence of what is being said.

The stage was set on the first day with a keynote presentation “Competing with Analytics” from author Tom Davenport. There were some interesting things that Davenport said that set the tone for the conference. “The planets are aligned for analytics” he said, meaning that all the necessary components for organisations to adopt and deploy analytical capabilities are being put in place: Data, Enterprise, Leadership, Targets and Analysts. “Using analysis is good, competing on analysis is better” summed up the need to be able to move from insight to action. There is no point knowing stuff if you don’t do anything about it. He described the five stages of an organisations analytics capability from being “Analytical impaired” at the low end of the scale to being “Analytical competitors” at the other end. Organisations such as Harrahs and Marriott ion the US and Tesco in the UK use analytics as a source of competitive advantage.

Another stand out presentation was from Tim Goudie from The Coca Cola Company. Tim described Coke’s journey from the early implementation of their web analytics platform through to the development of their whole measurement framework. Goudie told us that “Metrics are ridiculously political; there is no such thing as a neutral metric”. Once you begin to measure things, then your are likely to start to change behaviour.

Other sessions I attended confirmed my belief that measuring and understanding the impact of social media is still in its infancy. Metrics and measurement frameworks are still in development, debates still stage about the meanings of terms like “engagement” and so on. Fellow columnist Jason Burby reminded us that when it comes to social media measurement of the importance of defining what success looks like in terms of key behaviours and that whilst the activities may be different the underlying measurement processes are the same.

A great take out from the presentation by Ebay was the use of “home visits” to better understand the user experience. I have seen this technique used by consumer packaged goods companies where people from the company visit consumers in their own homes to see them, using their products in real life. This was the first time that I had heard of this approached being used by an internet company. Executives from Ebay would visit users in their homes to understand the context within which the site is being used, revealing more insight into what really goes on than a standard usability test would.

Jacob Nielsen though showed what you can get out of usability testing in the laboratory. He asserts from the many tests they’ve completed over the years that task completion rates are going up and stressed the value of using testing early on in the development process. Oh and by the way “most people tend to ignore junk on websites”.

So this industry is now more than just what comes out of a web analytics tool. It’s about having a range of tools and technologies embedded within strong business processes. As Avinash Kaushik told us it’s about “multiplicity, flexibility and agility”. The planets are indeed aligned for 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.

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.

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 year since we last blogged on the site and we have had the odd comment about it. At the back end of last year Avinash mentioned in his blog review of my presentation at Emetrics in Washington DC that we should have more content in our blog. As I explained to Avinash one of the challenges with a regular column at ClickZ that it’s not always easy to come up with sufficiently new and interesting stuff to talk about. And in any case there’s no way to compete with Avinash’s prolific output!

The web analytics space has many great bloggers, covering many different areas. Some are great on the technical side of explaining how to “do” web analytics, some cover industry developments and so on. I think it’s important to find some way to contribute to the debates without just adding to the noise. So, we’re going to give it another shot. We’re going to look at developments in the world of predictive analytics and data mining and I’m going to muse about digital marketing analytics and what’s happening here in Europe. We’ll be trying a few things out to see if they work, some will, some won’t, but that’s the name of the game. Stay tuned.

This post originally appeared in Applied Insights’ events section. 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’ events list into our own.

Applied Insights ran a one day workshop in Predictive Analytics in association with the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation summit on 22^nd May at the Hotel Russell in London. A course outline is below.

Please contact us if you would be interested in joining one of our courses or developing a customised in-house training session on predictive analytics.

Predictive Analytics – course outline

An Introduction to Data Mining and Predictive Analytics is a one day workshop covering the foundations of this innovation marketing analytics discipline. During the course of the day you will gain a thorough familiarisation with some of the key principles and methodologies of data mining and predictive analytics and learn how to apply them to common marketing problems such as:

• How can I predict campaign response?
• How do I segment my website visitors or customers?
• How can I anticipate possible customer defections?

In this one day interactive course we will cover the following topics:

Introduction:

• What is data mining and how is that different to predictive analytics?
• How organisations are currently using data mining and predictive analytics across their businesses and to solve particular marketing problems

Processes and implementation

• How to go about a data mining/predictive analytics project
• An overview of a standard industry process (CRISP-DM)

Methods and applications

• An overview of the main types of data mining and predictive analytics applications:
  • Forecasting
  • Segmentation
  • Classification
• An introduction to main methodologies such as:
  • Time-series forecasting
  • Regression analysis
  • Decision trees (CHAID, CART and so on)
  • Cluster analysis
  • Neural networks
• Case studies and examples of how these techniques are used and deployed in both online and offline marketing is areas such as:
  • Retention modelling
  • Conversion propensity modelling
  • Visitor segmentation

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.

If so, then Applied Insights are running a one day workshop in Predictive Analytics in association with the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation summit on 22^nd May at the Hotel Russell in London.

For more details and to register, see the emetrics website.

This post originally appeared in Applied Insights’ events section. 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’ events list into our own.

Neil will be giving a presentation at EyeforTravel’s annual Sales & Marketing in Travel Europe Summit to be held in Munich in October 2008.

This post originally appeared in Applied Insights’ events section. 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’ events list into our own.

At this year’s annual Web Analytics Congress in Holland, Neil delivered a keynote presentation on Marketing Optimisation and Predictive Analytics.