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Interview With Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee Results

May 16, 2010 – 10:01 am

This one is the one before last of the Big Integration blog post republishing before I close it for good. This interview with Larry Freed, CEO of ForeSee Results, was very interesting in the sense that Larry gave very good examples of the added value of integrating both behavioral and attitudinal analyses in Web Analytics. Still too many companies either don’t do both, or fail to really integrate them.

Today I am very happy to welcome Larry S. Freed, President & CEO of well-known ForeSee Results, one of the leaders in attitudinal analysis, often called Voice of Customer analysis. Larry was kind enough to find some time in his very busy schedule to answer a few questions about how behavioral and attitudinal analyses can be integrated to offer extra added value.

JW – Could you tell us about how online attitudinal analysis has evolved in the last 2, 3 years, and where it is now (adoption, evolution, etc.)?

 LF – We had our first beta client right after September 11, 2001, so we’ve been doing this work for seven or eight years now. I think five years ago, even two or three years ago, analyzing attitudinal input or voice-of-customer feedback was a nice-to-have. Only the really forward-looking, advanced companies did it. What we see now, especially with the weak economy and fierce competition for share of a smaller and smaller wallet is that attitudinal analysis is a must-have. There are a lot of academic studies showing that customer satisfaction is predictive of future financial performance, and companies really can’t afford to ignore it anymore. So we see more and more companies starting not only to collect and pay attention to attitudinal data, but when they can apply science to it, they are also using it to measure success and drive decision making. There is huge demand for actionable analytics that actually help companies make decisions rather than just sitting there in a spreadsheet, showing what already happened. Adoption of attitudinal analysis is fast and growing every day. The companies that aren’t doing it will be left behind.

 

 

JW – We are interested in data integration, can you tell us how ForeSee Results can make its data available? Any API, or export schema?

 

We make our data available through an FTP file transmission or clients can download data through our online portal. We can provide all the schema that people will need– file export schemas are available.  

We’ve actually created an exchange mechanism to take other sources of data in, be it behavioral or financial data; we can import those other sources into the ForeSee Results portal and marry those sources with our online satisfaction data.

 

 

JW – We would like to know if it’s possible to integrate ForeSee Results data with applications such as WebTrends or Omniture.

 

Yes, we do integrate with companies like Web Trends, Omniture, Coremetrics and other clickstream analytics tools by providing a common linkage point at a respondent level between ForeSee’s system and the clickstream analytics’ system. We’ve done this numerous times across various platforms.

 

 

JW – Is it possible to somehow link respondents to what they actually did on the site ? If yes, how do you technically accomplish that?

 

Absolutely, we have the ability to link either by integrating with the clickstream analytic tool, with a company’s internal behavioral/financial applications, or through passing of parameters from the web site to the ForeSee system.

 

 

JW – Without naming the client, could you give us an example of a company that actually linked their behavioral and attitudinal data? What was the most interesting finding that could not have been possible with only doing the survey?

 

There are a lot of great examples, and it’s been really instructive to see the kinds of things people can learn by linking behavioral and attitudinal data. It can be really simple—we had one client who was able to look specifically at browsers who abandoned a cart to find out what they were likely to do next—whether they were planning to buy from that same company in a store, buy from a competitor, return to purchase later, etc. This company was really able to put the cost of an abandoned cart into perspective when they saw why people were abandoning. Another great example is a company we worked with that was able to understand the value of improving satisfaction by linking satisfaction to purchase data. We know that satisfaction is proven to predict future financial performance, but integration actually allowed this company to prove that out and show how revenue increased as satisfaction increased. A third example is a company that was able to segment satisfaction and likely future behaviors based on referring site and keywords. They were able to see which referring sites resulted in the best and worst quality visitors. They could actually see that visitors who came to the site via one keyword were more likely to buy than those that came through another key word. This is invaluable information when it comes to marketing decisions and resource allocation.

 

 

 

JW –  How do you see a solution like yours evolve in the near future in terms of better integrating its data with other enterprise customer data systems ?

 

We’re actually just coming off a period where I feel we’ve made tremendous strides in integration. But the industry is always evolving, and our goal is always to make it as easy as possible to extract data from the clickstream tools.

 

 

JW – Thanks a whole lot, Larry.

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Analytics Culture, Web Analytics | Comments (0)

Interview With Barry Parshall, VP Product Strategy at Webtrends (at the time - 2009)

May 10, 2010 – 8:34 am

Another post coming from The Big Integration which I will close soon, since there just a couple of post I want to republish here for posterity (!). This one was done with Barry Parshall, then VP Products Strategy at Webtrends, who has since left the company.

Today, we got a top guest for our tbi interview : Barry Parshall, VP of Product Strategy at WebTrends. Barry has been at the heart of product evolution for several years. Prior joining WebTrends in 2001, he ran Crystal products for 4 years. Barry talks to us today about WebTrends Connect within the context of web analytics and BI integration.

I’m very happy Barry could take the time to answer the following questions. Each one of them would have stimulated many others, but this is a blog after all!

JW – Tell us more about WebTrends Connect. It doesn’t seem to be an actual product, nor a module of WebTrends Analytics.

 

BP – Connect is a collection of components (APIs, libraries, data models, drivers, etc.) that are an intrinsic aspect of all WebTrends Products. Connect is geared to fully expose the underlying data that drive our customer’s businesses and our analytics products. More importantly, Connect is the manifestation of our corporate philosophy predicated in customers being active participants in the development of their and our solutions to improving their businesses. A good illustration of this is our upcoming customer conference in which we provide a forum for customers to help design the agenda and content.

 

JW – What do you see as more common? Companies exporting aggregate data from WT and dumping it to their warehouse after some ETL, or using their BI application to connect directly into WT?

 

BP – Intuitively I’d say it’s a 50/50 split, as we haven’t performed a formal analysis. We know many of our customers use our ODBC driver to build their own Excel scorecards. More and more, though, customers are directly loading their Teradata and other warehouses with our WebTrends Marketing Warehouse data to garner a more complete view of the customer’s behaviors and transactions.

 

JW – What are the respective roles of WebTrends Analytics and Marketing Warehouse/Visitor Intelligence in the Connect/BI environment?

 

BP – Both products are supported with the same drivers, APIs, etc. – the difference is in the data they provide. WebTrends Analytics is an aggregate reporting solution that it provides operational reporting needs to help direct all aspects of your online marketing strategy. As such it contains much of the data to populate dashboards, scorecards and daily reports in external spreadsheets, portals or reporting systems.

 

The Marketing Warehouse provides a detailed accounting of every action taken by every visitor on the site. Just like a CRM system maintains a record of every phone call, every email, indeed every interaction with a customer, Marketing Warehouse maintains a physical data record of everything the visitor has done on your site. The data itself is stored in a SQL Server 2008 database with a fully documented and exposed database schema (as well as a library of abstraction objects). The role of the Marketing Warehouse is to provide the non-aggregated detail visitor-level behavioral data needed to drive the specific audience segmentation, data integration and rich analysis requirements of a given organization.

 

Visitor Intelligence is a packaged business intelligence solution extending the Marketing Warehouse. It utilizes a true OLAP data store and OLAP slicer/dicer component, along with other BI components and or course pre-built cubes and reports. It’s built on top of the exact same data models and APIs exposed in Connect and is a great tool for companies that don’t have an existing BI system they wish to utilize instead.

 

JW – How do you see the role of a high-end product such as WebTrends within the BI suite in enterprises? In other words, do you see WebTrends as becoming the application of record for Web – BI analyses? Doesn’t Analytics run the risk of becoming a kind of Web data pre-process application ?

 

BP – We believe that both approaches will be used for the foreseeable future. Many organizations will continue to operate their online marketing optimization within the silo of web analytics information – it’s a proven model and it works for basic marketing and operational needs. But for an increasing number of organizations, online data is seen as one piece of a broader business intelligence solution. These are organizations with firmly established practices, processes and investments in enterprise BI systems. For this organization, the reporting solution provided by the web analytics vendor has increasingly marginal value. It’s the data that’s gold, along with what can be done with it. There’s a reason why there isn’t a universal business intelligence solution … every organization has different BI needs. Packaged solutions like we see in the web analytics market can provide much of an organization’s needs out of the box, but as organizations become more sophisticated, requirements grow beyond what a typical vendor can provide in a “packaged” offering. This is when the data (un-aggregated) and the ability to leverage entrenched BI systems becomes vital.

 

So will web analytics turn into a pre-process application? To some extent, yes, in that some organizations will want nothing else from the web analytics provider (“just give me the data”). But I think a better way of thinking of this is that web analytics will adapt to greater business value which we believe is richer forms of analysis. Basic reporting tools, which are well down the path of being commoditized, will give way to more advanced analytical applications, such as those that mine relevance with high-value audience segments, statistical analysis of campaign attributes across all prior touch points, and so on.

 

JW – Can you comment on what WebTrends Connect is bringing to the table compare to Omniture and Coremetrics’ data integration efforts?

 

BP – What makes WebTrends unique with Connect is our commitment to industry-standard technologies, open and published data models and both deployment options (hosted and software). As a rule, data warehouse and business intelligence savvy organizations are frustrated by proprietary data stores, flat data dumps or any hindered access to the original detail data via rich data objects. All vendors provide APIs, but if the data has already been aggregated, it thwarts many of the integration and analysis needs.

 

JW – Thanks a lot, Barry.

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Web Analytics | Comments (0)

My Week At the TDWI Conference (2008) - VI

May 3, 2010 – 9:35 pm

Sixth and last post about my week at the TDWI World Conference in Chicago in May 2008. That was an amazing week of learning, one that had a profound impact in my development. I hope (re)reading those posts convinced you, web analysts, to go and explore the BI world. By the way, TDWI has several big conferences a year.

Back in Montreal after a very intense week at the TDWI World Conference. I must confess: the high mileage took its toll on me on the last day. I was supposed to attend Technology Architecture for BI: Planning and Design of the Technical Infrastructure by the very competent Deanne Larson. It turned out to have so much content, and very technical, that I could not absorb any more network maps. I however got amazing material about the topic, and this has definitively made me understand a lot of stuff I was hearing about (data warehouse, operational databases, ETL, etc.).

In the afternoon, I decided to switch and attend John O’Brien’s Emerging Technologies Shaping the Future of Data Warehouses & Business Intelligence. The first part was again quite technical with a long presentation on how SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) will impact the field. I would be lying if I said it got me all excited, but I could see how my co-attendants got interested. The part I liked most in John’s presentation was what he calls the “Google Effect”. His point was that Google has made us all so much used to a certain type of experience (fast, easy, relevant, free) that this is slowly creating new expectations from BI users: easier and faster access to better organized content (i.e. reports) is demanded more and more. I thought this was quite clever, since Google is now an important part of most Internet users’ life, and I think we can reasonably think that the type of user experience Google offers through their applications will somehow percolate to all things IT, with users demanding better performance with much easier and intuitive experience.

I didn’t stay for the full afternoon, being less interested by the Web 2.0 part, and wondering if I could catch an earlier flight (of course, there wasn’t one), but frankly too tired to take anymore stuff. My fellow participants were right to warn me at the beginning of the conference that six full days was tough.

I got back here with SO much to study and learn. I have now a fairly good mental map of what the DW & BI space is, and I am already beginning to see how Web Analytics could fit in. It has also brought up many questions about what Web Analytics should be in the future, and what could/should be BI regarding Web data. Questions I don’t have answers to yet, but will certainly develop in the months to come.

When you are an independent consultant like me, you go to those events on your own dime: cost of registration, travel, and missed billing all impact your own pocket. I must say that the TDWI World Conference was worth every dollar.

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Analytics Culture, Web Analytics | Comments (0)

“Hello, I’m Jacques Warren, and I Am One of Your Customers”

April 28, 2010 – 6:14 pm

To:

Phil Hartling

Senior Vice President, Marketing

Rogers Wireless

Dear Sir,

I received your letter today telling me that I had been selected for an exclusive offer of $50 off if I joined Rogers Wireless for a 3–year contract. Thank you, I really appreciate the attention.

The thing is: I have been one of your customers for three years now.

In fact, I even dare calling myself a very good one; as an independent consultant, I use my phone and data transfer services (I own an iPhone I got with my plan) a lot. Actually, I spend over $5,000 a year in service charges with your company. I am sure you have clients who spend way more than this, but I believe what I bring you is above your median wireless customer. Heck! It is after all an LTV of over $15,000 on a 3–year contract!

Anyway, how much I spend is not that important after all. What appalls me is the fact that you didn’t know. It really amazes me that your databases do not communicate yet, like, “I want to mail this guy; anyone knows him?” kind of DB request. Well, should I be that surprised?… However, as a marketer, I am expecting much more sophistication from a telecom company, considering the wild competitive environment you live in. Oh! but yes! I forgot; it’s all about customer acquisition in your market, isn’t it? But isn’t keeping a customer cheaper, and everything, etc, blah blah blah?

You see, I recently got a big problem solved by your customer retention people. After 4 very unsuccessful calls to your call center, I was starting to consider $300 very little money to switch providers. And in this now all social Web world, I had to tweet about it to get it done. Kudos to your retention people who caught it and helped me very rapidly. I am now fully trained to make all my demands to Rogers public (such as this blog post incidently).

Now, how about you offer me $50 off my next bill? That would make me feel loved!

Because, you see, that little unimportant letter actually hurt my poor customer feelings.

Yours truly… for another 3 years.

 

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Analytics Culture | Comments (3)

My Week At the TDWI Conference (2008) - V

April 27, 2010 – 3:49 pm

That day was a particularly enlighting one for me. It was my first true exposure to hard core data cleansing. Boy! That scrape the eyelids off my face! Fifth instalment of the Big Integration series about the TDWI World Conference back in 2008. The sixth and last one to be published later this week.

I guess I was naive. I thought that Web analysts were the ones who had to live in an approximative world, because of the nature of our data. Boy, can data get dirty in the BI world! I attended the full-day course today on Data Conversion, Consolidation, and Cleansing – Practical Skills given by the passionate Arkady Maydanchik. Arkady can pack the most number of pieces of information in 10 seconds I have ever seen! He actually made what many would consider a rather dry topic, something exciting. I am not kidding; data cleansing is very complicated to execute well. I’m sure it can be very absorbing.

So, yes, data can get really really bad in that world, but at least, they have means to work on that and make it better. I realized today again how little control we have on our data, since we basically have to trust the vendors on that. What is a bad “record” in Web Analytics? Is getting back to analyzing IIS logs a solution? Well, I wouldn’t go that far; I am a true believer in tagging. But I wonder if we could not get rid of proprietary data format, and work as a community towards standardized structures in how the data is collected. This would mean that logs collected from tagging could be analyzed by whatever Web Analytics product you purchased (or didn’t). I guess this is similar to the meta data situation with BI application vendors. It was clear yesterday at the night course that none of them wanted to make their meta data readable by other vendors. I don’t know anything about that field, but it seems that meta data schemes are pretty much what they base in part their competitiveness on.

I am not sure that a call for standardized log structure (in tagging I mean; I know IIS or Apache are already vendor-neutral logs) would be such a terrible thing to vendors in our field. In the process of doing so, I guess we could also think about how we could re-structure that data to be easier to integrate with other systems in the business. Anyway, food for thoughts.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference. I will attend another full-day class, this time on technology architecture for BI.

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Events, Web Analytics | Comments (0)

My Week At the TDWI Conference (2008) - IV

April 25, 2010 – 7:45 pm

Fourth post about my week at the TDWI World Conference in 2008 during which I learned lots of stuff that I wish would permeate more into Web Analytics…

Today I was in new territories. I took both sessions on Data Requirements Analysis and Data Profiling for Reengineering, Knowledge Discovery, and Information Quality, both given by David Loshin. We spent the morning discussing (well, not me!) data discovery, data assessment, and data requirements. We went deep and in all details into David’s methodology. It felt like speaking a foreign language at an upper-intermediate level: I cold understand all we talked about, but missed several of the subtleties.

I was very impressed with the level of scrutiny data warehouse and BI people put in their assessment of the data quality. I think we should pay a little more attention about that in Web Analytics. Of course, we are talking here (BI) about a way more complex world. Still, I think we should do a better job at questioning our data. Looking at all that can and should be done with data assessment, I even wonder now how the ASP model is good for us, if we can’t have immediate and full access to the data/logs. I mean, when you stop thinking about it, what validates the accuracy of the results in Google Analytics? Yes, the brand. That’s it! No access to the data; got to trust Google that the numbers are good. Not acceptable to a professional web analyst I think. This means that the Omniture and WebTrends (OnDemand version) of this world should make it very easy to access the logs.

The afternoon session was basically focusing on what can go wrong with data. Wow! a lot, as you can imagine. I can’t go through the details of all that. It would be too long and I haven’t digest everything yet (if I ever will!). I was just extremely happy to be exposed to all that.

In early evening, I listen to a vendor panel featuring SAS, Business Objects, Oracle, MicroStrategy, IBI, and Cognos. Besides the very deep technical stuff their customers in the room asked them, they all agreed that text/verbatim analysis was very hot. Most of them are choosing to acquire vendors in that field instead of developing that capacity.

OK, that’s it for today. Tomorrow is going to be even deeper in the data. I wonder if I will emerge from this week in one piece…

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Regular | Comments (0)

My Week At the TDWI Conference (2008) - III

April 15, 2010 – 8:03 pm

Third instalment of my series about TDWI World Conference I attended in Chicago in 2008, coming from my other blog, The Big Integration, which I will close soon because you never read it. Funny, what I saw and learned during that week is now so hype in Web Analytics!

OK, now I’m beginning to understand why people who were telling me that 6 days was exhausting were smiling. I’m starting to feel it in my bones. This was another day packed with information. The day started with Michael L. Gonzales again with a session called “HandsOn-Statistical Analysis for BI”. I have known that I needed to revisit statistics for a while (on Jim Novo’s advice), and I got confirmation again today. Actually, Michael was telling us that BI people as well tend to forget their importance. So, we went over exciting stuff such as descriptive statistics, linear regression, and control charts. I’m not being sarcastic here: it is really cool and exciting stuff. I wish I knew more, and will definitely hit the books. When I asked him about what books could be good, Michael suggested the two tomes in the For Dummies collection, even though he does not like them in general. However, these ones seem to be particularly good for a re-introduction to stats.

The afternoon was spent with Wayne Eckerson, whose book Performance Dashboards, has been an inspiration to me for some time. Although Wayne had way too much material to be covered in half a day, we went over very fundamental stuff in dashboarding: KPIs, business architecture, system architecture, design and layout, etc. I can tell you that dashboarding in BI is very heavy stuff. Projects can run in the hundred of thousands of dollars, given their complexity. This has nothing to do with what our Web Analytics vendors call dashboard. Aren’t we tired of those meaningless graphs we often scroll down over? I actually wish they were all under the tables!

OK, you can tell my the length of this post that I’m fried. Got to go to bed early tonight; tomorrow will be spent on data requirements analysis and profiling. Gulp!

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Analytics Culture, Web Analytics | Comments (0)

Three Candles on The Cake

April 6, 2010 – 9:24 am

Today is the third anniversary of my business. It is first and foremost the third anniversary of me saying “Bye Bye Boss!”. It was a tough decision, one that I have never regretted since. Working for oneself presents many challenges, that’s for sure, and sometimes a lot of stress, since nobody is there to take care of you with a nice little (stress the adjective) paycheck every other week.

But being independent means being free, being able to focus solely on my clients’ needs, not my bosses’. It is also the joy to take projects that interest me, not just because someone says yes to everything in order to meet the numbers.

So, I am extremely grateful to my clients; they’re the reason for this, the beginning and the end. Things are going to change at WAO Marketing in the coming months, and I am persuaded they will support the extra value I will bring them. And bringing value is everything, the rest is blah blah.

And you, dear readers, thank you for being here. I just hope to keep bringing value to you too.

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Events | Comments (1)

My Week At the TDWI Conference (2008) - II

March 31, 2010 – 7:55 pm

Now, the summary of the second day of a week that changed many things in my professional life.

Today was HandsOn-Business Analytics with the very interesting Michael L. Gonzales. Michael walked us through some high level topics in today’s BI: the promise of BI, the BI gap, filling the BI gap, dashboards and scorecards, advanced visualization, location BI, and data mining.

As in Web Analytics (I believe), BI is facing some frustration regarding made promises on which it still does not deliver well: “traditional warehouse technologies and techniques fall short of delivering the promise of BI” says Michael Gonzales. All those systems have been generating tons of reports, leaving the analyst will all the insight lifting to do. In short, too much reporting and not enough actionable information.

Gosh, does that rings a bell for us Web analyst!!

Michael stressed the importance of seamless integration of technologies, and simplified data delivery, as key components of the foundation of successful BI. He mentions that more and more the integration and data management defectiveness are embedded in today’s database products. ETL, for example, has just disappeared has a field in itself, and the reporting applications, such as Business Objects, Cognos, and Hyperion, belong now to the likes of Oracle, IBM, and SAP. That made me think that the latter, not the former ones, could be the potential buyers for high-end products in the Web Analytics field (no, not Google Analytics). When I look at all that is being done here, and the difference in size of the players, I can’t see what kind of long-term future there is for those vendors as stand-alone companies.

We discussed the difference between scorecards and dashboards, but I didn’t always agree with him. Michael Gonzales says that scorecards are the ones handling the KPIs, while dashboards are for operational use. To me, it seems to be more a question of vocabulary than true differences. Following W. Eckerson (whose workshop on dashboard I will attend tomorrow afternoon), I prefer to talk about strategic and tactic/operational dashboards. We did a little lab with Microsoft Scorecard Manager; quite neat (although a little poor on the design side).

Michael also introduced us to the new trend of visual analysis, which I was first exposed in June 2007 during Stephen Few’s first public seminar. It makes SO much sense to “look” at data to discover insights. We got to play with tools such as Advizor Analyst (ouch!), WebFOCUS Visual Discovery, ESRI Business Analyst (cool spatial analysis tool), and Tableau Software, for which I got a sweet spot.

We ended the day with data mining. M. Gonzales stressed the high quality of BI going on in that field, calling for the necessity to make it an important part of the BI portfolio.

This was a great day of learning, and I certainly look forward to tomorrow’s session, when I will attend, in addition to Eckerson’s class, another Michael Gonzales’s seminar on statistics.

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Events, Web Analytics | Comments (0)

My Week At the TDWI Conference (2008) - I

March 29, 2010 – 7:28 am

I continue my series of republished The Big Integration blog posts. As I said previously, I will close that blog soon, and want to keep some of those posts available for Google, and of course for you dear readers. I was going over my daily comments when I spent a week in Chicago at the TDWI Conference. That was my first true BI event, and dear! did I learn a lot!

I just got back from this first day very happy that I came here this week. We spent the whole day listening and interacting with Jill Dyché of Baseline Consulting. I knew Jill from two books I read a couple of years ago: e-Data: Turning Data Into Information With Data Warehousing, and The CRM Handbook: A Business Guide to Customer Relationship Management.

It was quite a fascinating day. Not only was it the very first session I have ever attended in BI, but I realized how much that world has in common with Web Analytics. The difficulties we often face (executive buy in, problems with planning, human resources, over-focus on tools, etc.) seem to be daily challenges in BI. Actually, I thought that field had left to prove than us, but I guess that, like any other practices that demand culture change, there is no easy path to success.

Jill’s session was called “BI from Both Sides: Aligning Business and IT”. You see? This could easily be the title of a Web Analytics presentation! She shared with us 11 techniques for aligning business and IT around BI. We could tell that all that information was coming from someone who has been at it for years. Besides having to deal with systems far more complex than Web Analytics, BI faces the same high-level challenge as WA. The human factor, i.e. champions, steering committee, executive sponsorship (which, to tell the truth, Web Analytics does not always enjoy), etc., is at the heart of the success of BI. One of the most important things to do, is to map the corporate strategy to the BI Portfolio (i.e. applications, systems, and data). Sounds familiar?

Another tip? Get quick wins. Gosh, don’t we know that!

So, you will excuse me if I don’t write more about today. I’m beat… and it’s only the first day!!

By Jacques Warren | Posted in Web Analytics | Comments (0)