We’ve only barely touched on the use of data to enhance targeting. In all of the media discussed above — email, site, and display — data only help refine the ability to reach with certainty. By creating models based on desired behavior such as purchase or click-through, marketers can fine-tune offers with even greater precision. Skilled analysts can find the meaningful relationships among offer, audience, and channel to cut down on waste.
— Banishing CPMs forever by Chris Marriott (Acxiom Digital)
Couldn’t have said it better myself….
Interesting that the top two online retailers in the Foresee Online Retail Satisfaction Index (Netflix & Amazon) are the ‘poster children’ for e-commerce personalization. Would be worth investigating how many of the top 100 have implemented some form of personalized recommendations on their sites to see if this is indicative of a larger trend.
I gained some insight today into why (at least for me) Google Reader’s “selected just for you” recommendations suck (see previous rant here).
In a paper presented at the IUI ‘10 Conference a group of Google researchers discuss different recommendation algorithms they have tested on Google News. They outline some of the problems with their default ‘personalization’ method (which relies on collaborative filtering), including the inability to recommend new stories and the inability to account for variability between users leading to “recommendation convergence” (this is my term, not the researchers’, but I think its appropriate). For instance, they observed:
… that entertainment news stories are constantly recommended to most of the users, even for those users who never clicked on entertainment stories. The reason is the entertainment news stories are generally very popular, thus there are always enough clicks on entertainment stories from a user’s “neighbors” to make the recommendation.
I assume that Google Reader is also using a collaborative filtering method to recommend articles “just for me” since the recommendation convergence issue would definitely explain why all I seem to get recommended are humorous (and presumably popular) videos.
I can only hope that the hybrid approach that was tested on Google News (and which performed 30%+ better than collaborative filtering) will be rolled out to Google Reader as well. Until then I’ll have to put up with clips “selected just for me” (and thousands / millions of other people ‘just like me’) like a lightning blot striking a plane, a baseball player jumping over the catcher and a young girl doing a trick on a bicycle (actually that last one is pretty cool!).
I completed a personalDNA report earlier today after being inspired by Fred Wilson (who shared his personalDNA report in the comments of this blog post).
Turns out I am a “Considerate Creator” (see results here and summarized in the table below). The results are broadly similar to similar tests (like Belbin and Myers-Briggs) I’ve completed at various team-building exercises over the years, although I am definitely seeing a greater focus on innovation (with “creativity”, “novel solutions”, “imagination”, “willingness to explore” all showing up in my profile), presumably as a result of working at a start-up for almost two years.
Excel charting guru Jon Peltier has a great post looking at alternative ways to present a stacked bar chart comparing use of different business intelligence products.
Jon presents about 10 alternative ways of displaying the data starting with a recreation of the (pretty incomprehensible) original stacked bar chart and ending with some elegant individual vendor bar charts. For me the panel column chart with series labels (shown on right above) is the most visually appealing and easiest to understand.
As always, a great post by Jon whose blog is a must read for avoiding the pitfalls of data presentation and visualization.
I absolutely love the new Chartbeat (which you can see in action here).
The design is stunning and the dynamic / flashing elements highlight that this truly is real-time web-analytics… the demo site is fascinating to watch (and must be borderline addictive for site owners).
I’m a business / finance and technology junkie…. at least according to Google’s Ad Preferences Manager. To be fair, its a pretty accurate assessment and should, although I can’t say I’ve noticed, mean that AdWords advertisers are able to target campaigns to my interests when I visits sites in the Google Content Network.
In contrast, Yahoo’s Ad Interest Manager (which I mentioned in a previous post) has me pegged only as a generic ’sports fan’. While that is also accurate, its not very specific (since I only really follow the Miami Heat basketball team).
Why the difference? I guess the sites I use for my business / finance and technology news are more likely using Google AdWords, whereas the sites I use for my basketball news are using Yahoo Advertising.
My Newstogram profile which reflects my reading habits on DailyMe.com (and other sites in the Newstogram Network) shows a much more accurate and rounded view of my interests and preferences (but of course of would say that).
I was excited to read this afternoon that Microsoft is on the verge of rolling out a new version of the MSN.com homepage to its 100M+ users.
A preview of the redesigned homepage is available here. The redesign finally gives the site a more modern look (farewell “iconic” blue background) and introduces some cool features around search, social media and local news. However, the following feature is potentially the most interesting:
Headlines on the page will now be customized based on user behavior, so, for instance, people who tend to be more interested in entertainment news will be more likely to see those type of stories.
I love this direction…. given the loyalty of their audiences, the big portals like MSN, Yahoo and AOL should be able to do a really good job of dynamic personalization (the sort of personalization that happens in the background without requiring the user to make choices or selections). As far as I can tell, Yahoo and AOL aren’t doing dynamic personalization (yet), so it seems that MSN may get a headstart in this area.
Hopefully MSN will be forthcoming with performance stats over the coming weeks / months as users adjust to the new design and features.
comScore’s Digital Year in Review 2009 reports that U.S. consumers viewed 4.3 trillion online display advertisements, including static and rich media ads, during 2009 (as measured by comScore’s Ad Metrix system). This represents a 21% increase over 2008, driven by increases in both the number of people exposed to display ads online (+8%) and the average ad frequency (+12%). What I found interesting about these stats is that the top 10 publishers (shown above) accounted for 1.8 trillion (or 42%), with the thousands upon thousands of other publishers, including all the major newspaper brands (Gannett, Hearst, NYT, Tribune etc), accounting for just 58%.
The Economist had an interesting article this week on the data deluge, in which it argued that, to help users feel like they retain control over their online data, sites need to make more data available to their users:
First, users should be given greater access to and control over the information held about them, including whom it is shared with.
I totally agree that sites should provide greater transparency with respect to tracking and data collection / storage. The Economist highlights Google which allows its users to see what information Google holds about them, and lets them delete search histories or modify the targeting of advertising.
Other sites are increasingly doing this too. For instance, I really like how the Newstogram technology has been implemented on DailyMe.com with a dedicated “My Newstogram” page which shows me what data the site is stored about me, explains how the data will and will not be used, and gives me the ability to correct the data or to opt out of tracking altogether.
Yahoo has similar functionality available through its Ad Interest Manager page (although Yahoo is either tracking a lot less about me or is not as good at determining my interests as they only have me pegged as a generic sports fan).
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