Comments on: Lab Store: Automating Worst Practices http://blog.jimnovo.com/2007/03/07/automating-worst-practices/ Moving from a Low Accountability to a High Accountability Business Model Tue, 7 Oct 2008 20:20:21 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Jim Novo http://blog.jimnovo.com/2007/03/07/automating-worst-practices/#comment-355 Jim Novo Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:25:46 +0000 http://blog.jimnovo.com/2007/03/07/automating-worst-practices/#comment-355 Eric - you know what's funny? If you run two identical AdWords campaigns with identical landing pages Google will choose one as the "winner"? I can't figure that one out... Brent, We have known each other for quite some time and have both played (along with others) a major role in the establishment of web analytics as a credible and proven way to increase the productivity of a web site. The providers of software and services in this space have managed (for the most part) to keep the dial turned down on puffery and let the facts speak for themselves. Please understand that the comments I have made (and I think this is true for <a href="http://www.grokdotcom.com/2007/03/09/hitting-the-landing-page-optimization-wall/" target="_blank">Future Now</a> and <a href="http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625052" target="_blank">Shane</a> as well) don't challenge the Touch Clarity technology. Math is math; I think everyone would agree "math works". I think what people are concerned about is statements like "delivers automated revenue and profit lift". You push a button and make money. It's pretty clear that no software, no matter how smart, delivers automated revenue and profit lift. As you said in your comment above: "Our customers must determine the content strategy–which products and product categories to promote, the best manner in which to promote them, which design styles to build, which offers to test, which calls to action, etc. etc." None of that is “automated”, right? It takes people who know something about the business to come up with a good content strategy. And that’s all I am saying. I’m hoping we can continue the great reputation web analytics has for delivering value as we enter the next generation of tools like Touch Clarity, and don’t get ourselves caught in the hype trap so many other technology areas have. Eric - you know what’s funny? If you run two identical AdWords campaigns with identical landing pages Google will choose one as the “winner”? I can’t figure that one out…

Brent,

We have known each other for quite some time and have both played (along with others) a major role in the establishment of web analytics as a credible and proven way to increase the productivity of a web site. The providers of software and services in this space have managed (for the most part) to keep the dial turned down on puffery and let the facts speak for themselves. Please understand that the comments I have made (and I think this is true for Future Now and Shane as well) don’t challenge the Touch Clarity technology. Math is math; I think everyone would agree “math works”.

I think what people are concerned about is statements like “delivers automated revenue and profit lift”. You push a button and make money. It’s pretty clear that no software, no matter how smart, delivers automated revenue and profit lift. As you said in your comment above:

“Our customers must determine the content strategy–which products and product categories to promote, the best manner in which to promote them, which design styles to build, which offers to test, which calls to action, etc. etc.”

None of that is “automated”, right? It takes people who know something about the business to come up with a good content strategy. And that’s all I am saying. I’m hoping we can continue the great reputation web analytics has for delivering value as we enter the next generation of tools like Touch Clarity, and don’t get ourselves caught in the hype trap so many other technology areas have.

]]> By: Eric Hansen http://blog.jimnovo.com/2007/03/07/automating-worst-practices/#comment-354 Eric Hansen Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:09:20 +0000 http://blog.jimnovo.com/2007/03/07/automating-worst-practices/#comment-354 Jim, don't be silly... :) AdWords optimizes for click-through, plain and simple. That's great if your a GOOG shareholder, probably not so great if you're an advertiser. But take note of the silver-lining: you can drill down within Google Analytics "Keyword Specific Testing" report to reveal which creatives are driving profit. But alas the built-in AdWords optimizer doesn't seem to use this data. Eric Jim, don’t be silly… :) AdWords optimizes for click-through, plain and simple. That’s great if your a GOOG shareholder, probably not so great if you’re an advertiser.

But take note of the silver-lining: you can drill down within Google Analytics “Keyword Specific Testing” report to reveal which creatives are driving profit. But alas the built-in AdWords optimizer doesn’t seem to use this data.

Eric

]]> By: Brent Hieggelke http://blog.jimnovo.com/2007/03/07/automating-worst-practices/#comment-346 Brent Hieggelke Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:46:08 +0000 http://blog.jimnovo.com/2007/03/07/automating-worst-practices/#comment-346 Hi Jim, It is nice to talk with you again; we know each other from my 6 years running marketing at WebTrends. I hope you are well. I read your recent post and thought it appropriate to address some of the points you make, as a fellow analytically-driven marketer with a unique perspective. I discovered Touch Clarity last Spring after I left WebTrends and initially, I too had great suspicion about the ability to automate the serving of the most valuable message to each visitor. I think all of us who have been deep in the analytics world hear this story and say "no way can that truly work." But then I spent many hours with Paul Phillips the founder of Touch Clarity, who is a multiple award-winner of the most prestigious direct marketing data-mining competitions in the world, the PhD's on the modeling team, and the client services team who walked me through an actual customer implementation, and showed me their uplift reports. Was I convinced? Yes, and in fact, I then bet my career that what they were doing was the next evolution of Interactive Marketing. And now 10 months later, it can honestly say it was the right bet. It really does work, and I personally offer my time to walk you through how the system has been designed to accommodate everything you mention, such as the fact that the content delivery can be optimized to achieve not only the highest click-throughs, but even better to achieve increased conversion, or to maximize revenue or profit. The modeling algorithms that drive all of this in an automated manner consider hundreds of variables in their scoring of visitors and in deciding which content to serve. All past behavior and current behavior of each visitor is considered…including recency and frequency of past visits, previous content exposures, referral sources and keywords, temporal and technographic and geo-location factors along with all of the other web analytics variables collected anonymously. Each one of these variables has a small amount of predictive power which collectively add up to a clear determination of the best content to serve to that visitor at that moment. In addition, we do consider sales cycles to watch for conversions or purchases that occur over several visit cycles after the first offer or content engagement. And you are absolutely right—other so-called “automated” systems that consider a few variables are apt to deliver the wrong answers, and may optimize simple click-throughs but over the long term degrade business results. That is why business rules engines that hard-wire a few simple decisions will fail. So how else does Touch Clarity continuously ensure the best decisioning of content serving? The system always targets versus a concurrent control group, which can be a champion/challenge scenario or a random serve. The system will automatically detect when perhaps there isn’t a clear best piece of content to serve and then test more until it knows for certain the best content to serve. Response curves vary several times every single day, so the system needs to be able to detect those curve shapes and change how it serves content accordingly. The solution also gives the marketing team full view of all of this through real-time reporting of the lift generated versus the control. So they know exactly the ROI of the targeting solution, at all times. So yes, this sounds amazing. It’s why the folks at Omniture made an investment to acquire the company rather than just partner. Knowing the analytics space very well, I believe it was a brilliant move and a natural extension for web analytics in general. Jim, we absolutely see marketing consultants and interactive agencies as being key partners with this technology. We automate the optimization and targeting of the best content from a catalog of candidate content options, but our customers must determine the content strategy--which products and product categories to promote, the best manner in which to promote them, which design styles to build, which offers to test, which calls to action, etc. etc. There is even more of an opportunity to work in both the left and right brain arenas with the Touch Clarity technology, and the best thing, is that it’s no longer an arbitrary decision or a political decision about what to put on the home page or key product pages. Marketers can get back to marketing strategy and creating different versions of creative and letting advanced mathematics and computers process untold amounts of data in milliseconds, considering hundreds of factors, to choose the best piece of content for that visitor at that time, and then be absolutely rigorous in making sure it is right, based on hitting a specific objective that the marketer defined. Perhaps accountants feared that Lotus 123 and Excel which automated the calculations of thousands of rows and columns of numbers in seconds would put them out of work, but frankly, it allowed finance professional to become more strategic business advisors and today we see the CFO as a key player of business teams, because they were freed up along time ago to focus on more strategic decisions than adding up numbers. I look forward to continued dialogue about this subject. Let me know when we can arrange a personal briefing. Best, Brent Hieggelke Chief Marketing Officer Touch Clarity from Omniture Hi Jim,
It is nice to talk with you again; we know each other from my 6 years running marketing at WebTrends. I hope you are well. I read your recent post and thought it appropriate to address some of the points you make, as a fellow analytically-driven marketer with a unique perspective. I discovered Touch Clarity last Spring after I left WebTrends and initially, I too had great suspicion about the ability to automate the serving of the most valuable message to each visitor. I think all of us who have been deep in the analytics world hear this story and say “no way can that truly work.” But then I spent many hours with Paul Phillips the founder of Touch Clarity, who is a multiple award-winner of the most prestigious direct marketing data-mining competitions in the world, the PhD’s on the modeling team, and the client services team who walked me through an actual customer implementation, and showed me their uplift reports. Was I convinced? Yes, and in fact, I then bet my career that what they were doing was the next evolution of Interactive Marketing. And now 10 months later, it can honestly say it was the right bet. It really does work, and I personally offer my time to walk you through how the system has been designed to accommodate everything you mention, such as the fact that the content delivery can be optimized to achieve not only the highest click-throughs, but even better to achieve increased conversion, or to maximize revenue or profit.
The modeling algorithms that drive all of this in an automated manner consider hundreds of variables in their scoring of visitors and in deciding which content to serve. All past behavior and current behavior of each visitor is considered…including recency and frequency of past visits, previous content exposures, referral sources and keywords, temporal and technographic and geo-location factors along with all of the other web analytics variables collected anonymously. Each one of these variables has a small amount of predictive power which collectively add up to a clear determination of the best content to serve to that visitor at that moment. In addition, we do consider sales cycles to watch for conversions or purchases that occur over several visit cycles after the first offer or content engagement. And you are absolutely right—other so-called “automated” systems that consider a few variables are apt to deliver the wrong answers, and may optimize simple click-throughs but over the long term degrade business results. That is why business rules engines that hard-wire a few simple decisions will fail.
So how else does Touch Clarity continuously ensure the best decisioning of content serving? The system always targets versus a concurrent control group, which can be a champion/challenge scenario or a random serve. The system will automatically detect when perhaps there isn’t a clear best piece of content to serve and then test more until it knows for certain the best content to serve. Response curves vary several times every single day, so the system needs to be able to detect those curve shapes and change how it serves content accordingly.
The solution also gives the marketing team full view of all of this through real-time reporting of the lift generated versus the control. So they know exactly the ROI of the targeting solution, at all times.
So yes, this sounds amazing. It’s why the folks at Omniture made an investment to acquire the company rather than just partner. Knowing the analytics space very well, I believe it was a brilliant move and a natural extension for web analytics in general.
Jim, we absolutely see marketing consultants and interactive agencies as being key partners with this technology. We automate the optimization and targeting of the best content from a catalog of candidate content options, but our customers must determine the content strategy–which products and product categories to promote, the best manner in which to promote them, which design styles to build, which offers to test, which calls to action, etc. etc. There is even more of an opportunity to work in both the left and right brain arenas with the Touch Clarity technology, and the best thing, is that it’s no longer an arbitrary decision or a political decision about what to put on the home page or key product pages. Marketers can get back to marketing strategy and creating different versions of creative and letting advanced mathematics and computers process untold amounts of data in milliseconds, considering hundreds of factors, to choose the best piece of content for that visitor at that time, and then be absolutely rigorous in making sure it is right, based on hitting a specific objective that the marketer defined. Perhaps accountants feared that Lotus 123 and Excel which automated the calculations of thousands of rows and columns of numbers in seconds would put them out of work, but frankly, it allowed finance professional to become more strategic business advisors and today we see the CFO as a key player of business teams, because they were freed up along time ago to focus on more strategic decisions than adding up numbers.
I look forward to continued dialogue about this subject. Let me know when we can arrange a personal briefing.
Best,
Brent Hieggelke
Chief Marketing Officer
Touch Clarity from Omniture

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