From cookies to customers

Marrying online data, such as webpages people have viewed, and relating this back to profiles on a marketing database to produce dynamic content has proved very challenging to date.

Andrew Hood, managing director at web analytics provider Lynchpin, says: "To be viable, such a system has to be able to make its targeting decision fast enough to deliver pages back to users in real time, often with vast amounts of data behind the scenes to process. Furthermore, the models that decide what the best product is to show to a given person at a given moment require a large investment in terms of money and time."

The advantages of being able to generate real-time decisions, however, are clear. According to Caspar Craven, co-founder and director of digital analytics provider Trovus, brands can tailor communications more precisely, understand what search terms have been used and enable a quicker turnaround of more tailored DM campaigns.

Real-time results

In recent months, a handful of players have launched products to address the difficulties linked to generating real-time decisions. Data analysis provider Alterian, for example, recently acquired Media Surface, a global web content management company, which it is integrating into its marketing database platform.

Alterian's chief technology officer, Mike Talbot, says the product enables communications across all channels to be optimised, with a particular focus on dynamic communication direct from websites. "Consumers only show a part of themselves in any individual channel," he says. "Analytics centred across all channels is the only way for marketers to understand consumers today, to see them more completely and at the speed the internet requires."

Earlier this year Digital Marketing Group launched Digital Brain, which it says brings together an individual's historical offline data, such as previous purchases, and combines this with data held at contact centres or derived from real-time interactions with a brand's website.

The system works with key data extracts rather than integration with a core central database and is therefore independent of a content management system or other delivery mechanism, working instead with the client's existing infrastructure. Hitachi Credit has used the product to enable its call centre agents to make specific product and service offers according to the customer's current and previous product choices, along with third-party profiling and risk information.

Customer insight consultancy group e-customermetrics, part of Indicia, is the latest company to tackle real-time decisioning. Steve Farquhar, the venture's managing consultant, says it will carry out bespoke work based on the technologies clients have in place and the capabilities it can offer.

"We don't believe that one system fits all - no one business is the same in terms of its internal operation systems and the way it accesses and stores data," he says. "We will look at how to integrate a client's data sources, ensuring both online and offline data can be viewed together."

He adds that web analytics tend to provide web reports, whereas e-customermetrics will aim to link anonymous web data with known customer information to provide clients with a deeper understanding of individuals and actionable recommendations.

The offline world is inherently multi-channel in nature and as such DM database providers such as SmartFocus and Kognitio already provide analytics products that gather and view data across multiple channels, including digital. SmartMarketer, for example, combines data and campaign management, digital marketing and measurement to create a single view of the customer, while Kognitio works with its partner KXEN to offer products capable of downloading daily patterns of customer behaviour that can be matched with customer profile data.

DM analytics

Chris Underhill, chief executive at SmartFocus, says marrying on- and offline information involves identifying the key data, having easy access to it, knowing what and how to quantify it and measuring campaign results. He says its SmartMarketer product straddles both DM and digital capabilities in real time.

According to Nigel Sanctuary, business intelligence propositions manager at Kognitio, the technology to generate real-time decisions about offer, copy, content and tone is available, but many providers are still not able to produce the right offer based on decisions resulting from online activity.

"One doesn't hear of too many consumers boasting about the superb relevancy or response rate of their dynamic channel experience," he says. "Using only dynamic modelling of online data limits the scope of the prediction, while trying to use dynamic modelling for a broad range of offline data is likely to hit problems of scale and performance."

Digital offering

So where do pure-play digital analytics providers fit into this picture? Neil Morgan, VP marketing at Omniture, says most web analytics tools can import offline data in some way but typically it's a crude data import. The company has developed Genesis, a real-time integration between its web analytics and more than 100 marketing applications to address this issue.

While digital analytics can provide information on how many people have visited a site, they cannot easily cover the 'who' and the 'why'. As Ben Langdon, chief executive officer at Digital Marketing Group explains, direct marketers are used to working with information that can identify information related to specific individuals, while web analytics companies predominantly use anonymous cookie-based data.

"Web analytics providers have traditionally been focused on collecting data and producing reports rather than creating intelligence that subsequently influences actions," he says. "This is changing as the need for analysis, interpretation and action becomes increasingly clear. Direct marketers, however, start from this point - analysis and reporting exists to measure and improve ROI and that means actioning strategies and tactics."

James MacDonald, head of marketing at web analytics provider Site Intelligence, believes digital marketing providers offer a system that is more granular, which can refresh the data faster, and which works from real data rather than a heavy use of assumptions.

According to John Ramdenee, consulting director at marketing systems provider CACI, programmes aimed at providing real-time marketing can fall into the trap of being too technology-led.

"There is a move by analytics suppliers to provide a full service combining web analytics with offline analytics and decisioning capability," he says. "The line between the two will blur further over the next few years resulting in analytical suites that form decisions based on data from offline and online sources. The channel the customer chooses to interact through will have less of an influence over which analytical tools are required to support personalisation or real-time decisioning."

The jury may still be out on whether a DM analytics provider or its digital counterpart can best meet the client's needs when it comes to marrying online and offline data. Irrespective of supplier however, there are a number of challenges for brands to overcome, including speed of processing - brands have to make the decision quick enough for it to be transparent for a user moving from one page of a website to another - and privacy.

"Users typically browse websites in the knowledge that they are anonymous until they explicitly provide personal information," says Lynchpin's Hood. "If their prior behaviour is actually being linked in at a personal level later in the day, privacy policies need to address this clearly."

The ability to combine on- and offline data to generate real-time decisions is a mouthwatering prospect for marketers - and this next generation of data analytical tools is already staking its claim to become the latest battleground between direct marketing players and their digital counterparts.

COMBINING ON- AND OFFLINE DATA - THE CLIENTS' VIEW

- Justin Moodie, Head of online, HMV

Technically, this is very difficult to do. Collecting detailed information from offline transactions isn't hard, but tying that information to the customer and their online profile, is.

Digital analytics can track and record everything a customer does online and, depending on permissions, tie that information directly to the customer. This gives almost total insight into the habits and behaviour of a customer on a site. Offline analytics has a much more difficult task because it can't track everything a customer does in the store - or before. Once that information is in place, it's then difficult to tie it to a specific customer. If they use cash, for example, they are anonymous.

- Mark Jenkins, Marketing director, LA Fitness

Generating the appropriate quantity and quality of creative work to put into testing that will offer meaningful insights when responses are analysed. It is useful to develop a number of different approaches for testing as the true answers often lie in the gaps between what is viewed and what the consumer actually likes.

Digital analytics providers offer the hardware and technical expertise to execute the research. If they wish to be seen to be a key part of the process then they also need to include or develop the skill sets associated with traditional research and agencies as well as the numeracy skills of a traditional analysis provider.

- Nicola Young, Director of marketing communications, Coors

Marketers need to consider the additional cost of developing complex measuring systems and the resource required to interrogate the information as well as that of developing tailored content.

Digital analytics provides behavioural tracking from websites and emails, ideally feeding it back to the existing databases to give a full picture of our relationship with consumers. It also feeds into other online systems for dynamically altered content. It provides the infrastructure to enable us to track and understand behaviour. Many digital analytics providers still need to work on how their systems integrate with existing databases, however, as without this we often end up with isolated data silos.

POWER POINTS

- Marrying online data with profiles on a marketing database has been a challenge

- Digital analytics cannot easily explain who has visited a site or why they visited

- The line between web analytics and offline analytics will blur in the next few years