Saturday, November 10, 2012

Behavioral Targeting and Predictive Analytics

For this blog, I will select a company and discuss how they can use behavioral targeting and predictive analytics to improve customer experiences. The company I will use for this exercise will be Schuler Books and their website www.schulerbooks.com. My analysis will be provided as responses to the following questions:

How could your company use behavioral targeting to improve their customer experience?
Behavioral targeting can provide Schuler Books with a lot of information about their customers. Some of the information may include:
  • Purchases made in the past
  •  How customers interact with the website
  • Products customers may want to buy in the future
One metric Schuler Book could utilize is a RFM metric (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value). Using a RFM metric provides a plethora of information about customers. With it, Schuler Books can figure out how often a particular visits their site, how much time there was between visits; and what their purchasing history has been on the company’s website.

If Schuler Books wanted to implement this sort of metric, the company could break each attribute down into categories using data mining tools like JavaScript tags or CHAID (Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection). For example, Schuler Books could use categorize client purchases into: 
  • Purchases made in the last 30 days
  • Purchases made in the last 31 to 60 days
  • Purchases made in the last 61-90 days
After categories have been made for each attribute, the company can then evaluate the data and create segments for each point the values intersect. If each of the three attributes had three categories, this would result in a matrix that provides 27 possible combinations. From there Schuler Books can determine which segments are the most valuable and which ones are the least. This type of metric requires no specialized software and simplifies data acquisition while providing information that is ready to use and easily understood.

How could your company use predictive analytics to improve their customer experience?
If Schuler Books were to use predictive analytics, it would first have tag all their pages. JavaScript tags would be a useful option for this step. Using the data acquired, the next step would be to decide what data is important to them. Purchases, more specifically, types of purchases could be a possible point of focus.  After deciding on which information is most valuable, Schuler Books research various analytic tools that would fit their needs. Two possible solutions would be:
  • IBM’s Smarter Analytics
  • S.A.S.’s Predictive Analytics and Data Mining
Depending on Schuler Books’ financial situation, the company could opt for finding free analytical tools that are available. Tools like Google Analytics may be sufficient in the amount of useful data it provides. However, if someone is unfamiliar with collecting and analyzing website, it is probably best enlist the services of someone like S.A.S. or IBM. These companies have products in place that could be customized to the specific needs of Schuler Books. The company would be able to get a more in depth customer analysis, which would lead to an enhanced customer insight.

4 comments:

  1. Very informative. I like how you categorize purchases in a specific amount of days. I think that is most effective way of keeping track of history. Good Job.

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  2. Awesome!! The company need to focus on what and when the consumer visits the site as you stated and calculations must be made and revisions to handle the traffic efficiently. Great Job!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  3. Very awesome measurement sitting. I think it should be able to help the company carry out a detailed analysis of their sales?

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  4. Hi! Would you be interested to write an guest post for www.behavioraltargeting.biz?

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