Monthly Archives: February 2014

Experimentation is a Must

word cloud

 

This word cloud represents the answer to the question of which areas are you going to be experimenting most heavily in the coming year, given by more than 600 representatives of different online companies.

Experimenting is one of the key tools of marketing engineering, and although the results of test-and-learn approaches are more widely appreciated, establishing the most appropriate culture is what holds most companies back, if we neglect the fear of failure.

Continue reading

What are the most exciting opportunities for companies this year?

Hello everybody. Today I want to share with you a new research conducted by Adobe that we got our hands on these days. It’s actually a perspective view over the digital world and a briefing of what to expect from this field in 2014.If last year was about recognizing the importance of customer experience, this one is about actually doing something. For an optimal customer experience, various business functions and customer-facing touch points need to be working in harmony, from customer service and advertising to online user experience, content management and email messaging. For the question of which one area is the single most exciting opportunity for your organization (or for your client) in 2014 the responses were diverse but following a well defined pattern.

the webWe know the number of company respondents (980) and the one of Agency respondents (1202) and from this we conclude that organizations need to ensure they have the right data, technology and culture to act as the foundation for a great customer experience, with a focus on multichannel marketing and campaign management also required to underpin a successful approach.

The mobile part, the second most exciting opportunity in the eyes of client-side respondents and first on the list for supply-side participants has a well earned position. About this we’ve already written in another post few weeks ago and is no surprise at all.  Despite the importance of mobile and prominence of smartphones and tablets in our lives, many companies are still trying to work out how they optimize their websites for mobile, for example, whether they should go down the ‘responsive’ route or not.

A second figure that i’d like to discuss is not so much about the big picture and more about specific disciplines. The question is which three digital-related areas are the top priorities for your organization (or for your clients) in 2014?

miner

It seems that marketers and digital professionals are clear on what the priorities are, and this has not changed markedly in the last year, knowing that the top five options are in exactly the same order as for last year’s survey, respectively content marketing, social media engagement, targeting and personalization, conversion rate optimization and mobile optimization.

 

 

 

Data Grants from Twitter

There is a lot of fuss these days because of the newest announcement made by Twitter on February 5. They encourage research institutions to apply until March 15 in what seem to be a scientific lottery, for a chance to the access of twitter’s data sets. Around 500 million Tweets are sent out each day and if they were to be scientifically quantified, studies like where the flu may hit,  health-related information or events like ringing in the new year could be analyzed from a statistical point of view and outcomes could be predicted.

Twitter acknowledges the difficulties that researchers have to face when they have to collect data from the platform and therefore it named this project the Twitter Data Grants, aiming for a better connection between research institutions or academics and the data they need. Also, along with the data itself, the company will offer for the selected institutions the possibility of collaboration with their own engineers and researchers, all this, with the help of Gnip one of the most important Twitter’s certified data reseller partner.

How to make your life easier with Google

Ok, maybe the title is a little bit too optimistic, but today I want to talk about one of the many Google products that makes our daily life better.  Everyone uses Google, either for personal matters or for business interest but how many have heard about The Google Prediction API?

This, as the most of their projects, comes to our help, by learning algorithms to analyze your historic data and predict likely future outcomes. It can be very helpful, especially in the case where big amounts of data are to be handled. You can also say that Big Data is not anymore the future, it’s now and you have to know how to take advantage of it.

Among the uses of Prediction API we can mention, separation of certain types of messages, considering the languages that are written in for specific answers, or spam detection, based on comparison to a lists of already marked spam messages. But maybe the most important use case that we can think of is the purchase prediction, the ability to understand the customer’s behavior and to decide whether or not he is going to make a purchase from your e-commerce business.

In the past, this would have been done using a regression model, being very time consuming and quite hard and this is why I believe that Google Prediction API is one of the tools that will make your life easier and increase profit on your internet business.