From: Version 2.0 Communications
Link:Version 2.0 Communications
By: Katelyn Henry
August 20, 2010
San Francisco and Needham, MA - August 20, 2010 – Marketing investment decision support leader Visual IQ,today announced the completion of a $3 million growth investment by Fog City Capital. The company, which provides software and services that help its clients turn data-driven insights into actions that deliver better returns on their marketing dollars,plans to use this funding for expansion and growth, including building its team, advancing strong partner relationships and advancing its technology infrastructure.
The investment comes at a pivotal point of growth for the company, as the marketing industry continues to embrace new opportunities to integrate and optimize marketing and advertising activities across channels. As a result, Visual IQ has seen remarkable surge in demand for its core data integration, attribution and optimization product modules
Visual IQ combines its deep understanding of digital media and advertising along with strong technology capabilities in large scale database management, rigorous econometric modeling and rich user experience design to help marketers quickly and easily understand inter-channel attribution as well as the reach, cost and impact of each tactic.
Some of the most prominent brands in the world, such as AT&T, CVS, Texas Instruments and Vanguard Financial, rely on Visual IQ’s flagship IQ Intelligence Platform to manage and improve their advertising effectiveness. Visual IQ also partners with leading media and creative agencies and other marketing technology companies to bring total solutions to their clients.
"We are very proud of what Visual IQ has accomplished," said Manu Mathew, Founder and CEO of Visual IQ. "We continue to see tremendous sales momentum and furthermore, we have identified a number of opportunities to expand our product footprint. We are excited to partner with Fog City Capital to help us scale our growth, particularly given their domain expertise in digital marketing and analytics."
"Fog City is thrilled to be partnering with Manu Mathew, Anto Chittilappilly and the outstanding team at Visual IQ," said Adit Abhyankar, a Partner at Fog City Capital. "Visual IQ is working hard to provide answers to some of the most critical questions for an advertiser: How much should we spend, through which media, and what results should we expect. Given the team's deep domain expertise and experience working with some of the largest advertisers in the world, Visual IQ is uniquely positioned to provide thought and execution leadership to its clients."
About Fog City Capital
Fog City Capital, LLC is a private equity firm that partners with existing management to grow middle-market business services and software firms into industry leaders. Their team of professionals and advisors combine hands-on entrepreneurial skills with extensive backgrounds in managing global services and software companies. They are currently specifically focused on investments in the marketing value chain. They make equity investments primarily through management buyouts, recapitalization and growth financing to companies with revenues between $10 million - $50 million.For more information, visit www.fogcitycapital.com.
About Visual IQ
Visual IQ is the leading provider of enterprise software for next-generation
marketing investment decision support. The company’s software-as-a-service analytics solutions help marketers and agencies improve return on marketing investments with performance insights across the complex and ever-expanding media mix. Visual IQ quickly integrates high volumes of data from disparate sources to provide user-friendly, scientifically rigorous, actionable insights for today’s metrics-driven marketers and their agency partners. Customers, including industry leaders among the Fortune 500, have deployed Visual IQ’s analytics to gain marketing efficiencies and a competitive advantage over their competitors. For more information visit www.visualiq.com.
Visual IQ Announces $3 Million Investment by Fog City Capital
Marketing faces more data, more demand for analytics
From: Mass High Tech
Link: Inc Technology
By: Jim Schakenbach
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
This is both a scary and exhilarating time to be in marketing and advertising, depending on your perspective. The meteoric rise of social media and the growing consumer power associated with it have been compounded by the proliferation of niche media channels and the diminishing impact of traditional broadcast and general interest media. As a result, marketers and advertising agencies are under increasing pressure to produce meaningful, measurable marketing campaigns to reach fractured target audiences.
They are attempting to turn all that data into usable information that can provide clues for creating even more effective messages and channels to influence consumer spending.
"As more devices and channels become available, it presents new challenges to marketers and advertisers," said Kiki Mills, president of the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) in Cambridge, an Internet business and marketing association. "Everyone’s collecting data, but how can they get meaningful data? That’s the bigger question."In response, new applications and technologies are emerging to manage and manipulate data throughout the entire promotion and purchasing process. It is perhaps no coincidence that several of this year’s MITX Technology Awards went to companies involved in some aspect of data management and analytics, including DataXu of Boston, an online advertising optimization platform developer and Modiv Media of Quincy, which is developing in-store systems for delivering targeted, real-time promotional and purchasing information to consumers.
MITX online advertising category winner DataXu is a company that is "taking a lot of data from the Internet — a lot of consumer data and media data and applying machine learning to basically recognize consumer patterns and media patterns that correlate to sales," according to CEO Mike Baker. DataXu’s patent-pending technology was developed at MIT by its founders, creating a platform that uses real-time consumer preference data to value, bid-manage and buy ads on an impression-by-impression basis, across online ad exchanges operated by Google, Yahoo and others.
A little over a year old, DataXu is backed by Boston’s Flybridge Capital Partners and Atlas Venture, as well as West Coast venture firm, Menlo Ventures. The company launched in September 2009 at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, where it was recognized as having one of the top 50 hottest new products.
In a similar vein, Visual IQ Inc. of Needham, helps ad agencies, marketing firms and advertisers mine the growing glut of data across expanding media channels to better understand customers and determine how to reach them. As a former advertising executive, Visual IQ CEO Manu Mathew said he understands the pressure to find the most efficient channels.
"Today, to effectively reach the consumer, (you) have to hit them at different times with different messages in different channels," he said. Visual IQ has developed a platform to help marketers "gain control of that data stack" and optimize their ad spend. A couple of years old and bootstrapped by its partners, Visual IQ is seeking venture funding to expand its sales force after landing such top shelf clients as AT&T and American Express.
Once customers have been lured into stores by advertisers using technology such as DataXu’s and Visual IQ’s, customized offers and discounts can be delivered to individual buyers based on buying profiles using technology developed by Modiv Media of Boston. Modiv built a business model around a trend called "shopper marketing," which director of product management Matt Volpi said has advertisers "putting their campaigns in the mindset of the shopper instead of looking at the vehicle as the focus."
Instead of using a particular channel to broadcast a generic offer to all customers, Modiv’s technology enables the retailer to mine customer purchasing history data to push a specific offer to individual customers based on their preferences.
So where is all of this going? In short, to a place where marketers can reach individual consumers with increasingly targeted messages across all channels, from websites to email to smartphones. But, cautions marketing analytics expert Cesar Brea, partner in marketing analytics firm Force Five Partners, there comes a point of diminishing returns.
"Maybe instead of integrating so many different data sources, you integrate, say, just three and execute really well in them, getting maybe 80 percent of the benefit without struggling with those many other sources and perhaps not executing as well."
Fight Click Fraud on Pay-Per-Click Ads
From: technology.inc.com
Link: Inc Technology
By: Kim Boatman
June 30, 2010
Click fraud is particularly a concern for small businesses with limited advertising budgets. How can you be sure that when you buy pay-per-click advertising that it’s a legitimate customer and not your competitor attempting to run up your advertising costs, a bot, or a person in a developing country being paid to click?
When you utilize pay-per-click advertising, you want to know that each click represents an honest-to-goodness potential customer.
Two recent lawsuits filed by Microsoft highlight one of those loopholes, a disturbing new trend in click fraud called click laundering. Microsoft accuses the Texas operator of a science-related website of using sophisticated methods to collect revenues from clicks. Malware is used to impersonate search engines and send unsuspecting users to fake domains. When the user visits the domain and clicks anywhere on a page, they are clicking on a hidden ad, and the advertiser pays for the click.
Despite the aggressive pursuit of click fraudsters by Microsoft and other reputable companies, more than 17 percent of clicks were fraudulent in the first quarter of this year, according to Click Forensics, which monitors click fraud. That jives with recent research by Visual IQ, which produces marketing intelligence software. The company estimates marketers lose an average of 16.7 percent of their pay-per-click budgets to fraud.
"Many of our clients don't even know they are victims," says Visual IQ founder Anto Chittilappilly. "After it happens, you can file lawsuits against the fraudsters and the search engines, but to get that money in the bank is going to take a long time."
Click fraud can be particularly crippling for small to mid-sized businesses with limited advertising budgets. However, while you may be somewhat reliant on the big guys to patrol click fraud, there are best practices you can follow to protect yourself.
Common click fraud techniques
It helps to have some idea of what you're up against. Chittilappilly says the fraud might be perpetrated by your competitor, who drives clicks to deplete your advertising budget early in the morning each day. Unscrupulous website operators also try to cash in with fake clicks.In addition to click laundering, click scams may use one of these techniques:
- Manual clicking. In developing countries where labor is cheap, workers might be paid to click to run up totals
- Software clicks. Automated clicks can quickly run up totals, Chittilappilly says.
- Bot networks. Using malware to harness unsuspecting users' computers, criminals can create large networks of computers employing programs that imitate clicks. "This is really problematic and takes out most of the money in click fraud," Chittilappilly.
Sean Sullivan, security advisor of North American labs for security solutions company F-Secure, says he sees a significant amount of malicious code designed to affect ad clicks. "Some fraudulent activity would seem to yield small rewards, but remember that many participants come from developing nations," he says. "That base of people will continue to grow."
Your click fraud checklist
Being a vigilant, persistent advertising consumer is crucial to protecting your pay-per-click budget. Experts offer these tips:- Partner with reputable firms. Don't bargain hunt. Rely on established brokers, marketing agencies and networks, says Kirby Winfield of Mpire, which produces AdXpose, online ad campaign verification and optimization technology. While you might not be able to afford this sort of technology on your own (AdXpose runs about $1,000 a month), you should ask what sort of verification software or system your partner is using. "Ask up front 'Do you provide verification of where your traffic comes from? Do you work with a third party?'" Winfield says. "Establish a relationship with your provider and verify they actually acquire their traffic in a transparent way."
- Limit your campaign geographically. Approximately 44 percent of clicks originating in Vietnam are fraudulent, estimates Chittilappilly. If you're seeing high click totals from countries such as Vietnam, India, Nigeria, and Russia, you're likely the victim of click fraud. You can limit your pay-per-click campaign to where you sell your product or set limits to avoid regions rife with click fraud even if you sell globally.
- Set daily budgets. Evaluating on a daily basis will help you red flag suspicious activity more easily. If your budget is depleted each day, monitor when the action occurs. "If all the clicks are happening at 2 a.m., clearly there is a problem," Chittilappilly advises.
- Watch click-through rates. Realistically, you shouldn't expect more than 10 percent of people who view your ad to click through to your website, says Winfield. Be wary of an explosion of clicks generated through one URL.
- Know where your ads are running. If your ad is supposed to run on a list of sites, be able to monitor how much of your volume went to premium sites, says Winfield.
It's not a case of buyer beware, says Winfield, but of "buyer be aware." Your careful monitoring of your pay-per-click budget is like using the Club to secure your auto, advises Smith, of Accuvant. "When you secure your car, the criminal goes by and picks another car. As long as you implement measures other companies aren't implementing, the other companies are going to be more likely targets."
The Bottom-Line Benefits of Behavioral Targeting Marketers can enhance the results of behavioral targeting with the right actions, and integrated data
June 14, 2010
From: 1to1 Magazine
Issue: June 2010
by Elizabeth Glagowski
Web Page Link
In the years since Amazon's debut, the opportunities and challenges around behavioral targeting have evolved. As customer expectations increase and new technology becomes available, marketers need to take behavioral targeting to the next level, experts say.
The goal is to capture as much of a user's intent as possible, says Manu Mathew, CEO of VisualIQ. Organic and paid keyword searches, email, mobile, or website activity, and interaction with online advertisements are some of the most common types of customer behavior that companies track. But data collection is just the first step.
"While the types of behavior are important in how they inform good behavioral marketing, where that behavioral information is used is important, too," says Josh Gordon, director of marketing at Knotice. "Many marketers concen-trate on creating traffic for their website with behavior-based targeting, but neglect the importance of carrying that relevant experience throughout the entire website experience. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit with behavior- based targeting that marketers have yet to uncover because the focus between driving traffic and converting it is imbalanced."Mathew agrees, saying that most behavioral data is siloed, split among departments and even agencies and other third parties. "Companies need to leverage the intelligence in a cross-channel way to understand the potential value of their audience," he says. "Overlay attributes with other systems to inform [customers'] value and drive rules and triggers based on customer potential and lifetime value. Today, the value of the audience has not yet come into play." He says the goal should be to use behavioral data to create deeper engagement with high-value customers.
"There is still much alignment that needs to be done [across channels]."
Behavioral targeting is important, but some experts say that it in its current state the practice does not go far enough to understand customer needs. Professors Don Schultz and Martin Block of the Medill School at Northwestern University recently wrote a report Expanding the Success of Behavioral Targeting With Service Resource Availability, which recommends that marketers use deeper insights to understand consumers' purchase intent.
"Most behavioral targeting today is based on specific products or services which the customers access," the report states. "If no product or service trail is evident, the algorithms used in behavioral targeting are often not applicable."Additionally, privacy concerns about data collection are growing, and there are limits to the behavioral data that is currently collected. According to Block, these limits are due in part to the challenges collecting the data
- Behavioral data may not be available, or housed with a third party.
- New products or those infrequently purchased may not have any behavioral tradition.
- Privacy issues with data collection, particularly in the digital space.
The authors suggest that "the services to which the consumer has access can enhance and improve, and in some cases offer totally new behavioral targeting opportunities for the marketing organization." Simply put, "when you don't have perfect behavioral data, there may be other variables to look at," says Block, who adds that individual customer's behavioral data is best.
Using consumer survey data from BigResearch, the authors correlated purchase intention to social media activity, ownership of a video game console, and credit card ownership. "It allows the marketer to move beyond directly related consumer behaviors such as book purchases or online searches for products and services to build a holistic view of the specific customer," the report states. "These seemingly unrelated consumer behaviors predict purchases in different product lines and categories."
The data found a correlation between owning a video game console and purchase intentions across many product spaces, including non-obvious ones like women's clothing and health and beauty aids. In addition, those who also own a credit card and use social media were more likely to purchase across a majority of categories."This is by no means perfect," Block says, "but it's a whole lot better than relying on demographic information if you don't have solid behavioral data."
He adds that the research shows that no one variable should be used to build behavioral targeting delivery systems. "Expanding the basic premise of behavioral targeting is in order and should be considered by marketers going forward."The benefits of behavioral targeting
Although companies should do more to advance their behavioral marketing strategies, doing any type of behavioral targeting can have its benefits. Interactive Data, a software company that provides solutions for the collections industry, started its behavioral targeting efforts earlier this year as part of a new lead nurturing program. "Before our leads never went from cold to warm to hot," says Jacqueline Schaeffer, director of compliance. "They were just cold.
Looking at a user's behavior on our site helps us target them better." Monitoring behavior – including what pages prospects visit, how frequently they return, and what content they download determines lead scores and treatment strategies. The company works with Maas Impact on its strategy.
As a result of its targeting efforts, Interactive Data has seen a 40 percent lift in leads overall, and a 50 percent increase in closed deals. "The goal," Schaeffer says, "is to make the sales cycle as efficient as possible by aligning marketing and sales with relevant customer information."
Crossing the Channel
April 6, 2010
From: MarketingProfs.com, The Po!nt
He blames the erroneous attributions on common errors such as these:
- Using non-standardized key performance indicators (KPIs). There's a good chance you track performance in silos—using different metrics to measure each channel. "Online search has KPIs such as clicks, conversions, and cost per action, whereas television has KPIs such as impressions and gross rating points," he notes. "Even smart marketers who employ best-of-breed agencies often track their agencies' performance in silos." The solution is an integrated, holistic approach to measurement that identifies what works and what doesn't.
- Neglecting the positive effects of synergy and timing. "[I]f one channel is good in giving a lift to another, another may be good at receiving the lift and producing conversions," Chittilappilly says. Your television commercial, for instance, may enhance the effectiveness of your Google AdWords campaign—but may not be recognized for its true contribution.
The Po!nt: In a cross-channel world, you need cross-channel analytics that enable you to identify the true source of ROI.
Cross-channel audience analysis and re-marketing
From: DMNews E-mail Marketing Weekly
Link: DMNews E-Mail Marketing Weekly
By: Anto Chittilappilly, president/CTO of Visual IQApril 27, 2010
Most e-mail and database marketers do some level of audience analysis on their e-mail lists to find patterns and propensity to convert. Some of them join these databases with the richer demographic datasets provided by companies like BlueKai or eXelate to further improve their models. But the majority still overlook some very important items to consider, including:
- If the audience analysis model incorporates how the e-mail channel is helping other channels to improve their business KPIs, and conversely, if the other channels help the e-mail channel to improve its business metrics. Channels like online display, search and affiliates normally gets a lot of lift from e-mail channel and TV, print, radio advertising provide lift to the e-mail channel.
- The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: A carefully orchestrated TV, e-mail and search advertising can generate about than 43% more overall conversions than these channels executed in silos.
- The e-mail channel can be used to re-market to the users based on the behavioral insights derived from other channels. For example, somebody who has searched the keyword “Aruba vacations” is more responsive to an e-mail offer of “20%-off” for their next Aruba trip rather than getting a generic e-mail, but you first need to know that this person searched for that keyword.
- Marketers too often confuse media metrics like contacts mailed or open rate, with actual business metrics like conversions and ROI. To maximize business metrics, you need to integrate the customer data with your media data.
To address the points above, e-mail marketers need to think more seriously about deploying an attribution model. A good attribution model tells how the channels help each other and allow marketers to device holistic campaigns that work across the channels. An attribution system compiles all touchpoints of a single user from all channels with timestamps, so marketers can better attribute sales back to your e-mail campaign.
For example, John Smith has seen an online display ad offering a “5% off” deal on vacation travel at 10:23 pm on March 2nd, and then an e-mail with “$200-off” offer on March 27th. When he then searches for “Hawaii vacation deals” on March 28th and makes a purchase, we must give credit to the e-mail and display channels also because we know these touchpoints are of the same person.
E-mail works as the superglue between the other channels and delivers the richer demographic datasets. It adds quality to the input data sets for attribution models, which tends to predict better for higher ROI goals.
VisualIQ Measures Marketing Impacts Across All Channels
Summary: VisualIQ combines customer-level transactions and contact history with traditional aggregate data to produce better marketing performance measurement. It hasn't solved the problem of identifying the same customer across channels, but it's trying.
I was going to start this post by writing that last-click attribution has recently come under fire, but the first Google hit on the topic brings up a study from 2007. So maybe the criticism isn’t particularly new. But the fact remains that, now more than ever, marketers are trying to measure the impact of all contacts on customer behavior.
Broadly speaking, the problem is attacked in two ways. One, most common among consumer goods manufacturers and others who do not sell directly to their customers, uses aggregated data in marketing mix models to find correlations between marketing efforts and total sales. The other, favored by banks, retailers, communications providers and others who do sell directly to known buyers, assesses the impact of each contact with specific individuals. Last-click attribution is a particular challenge for online marketers because they fall between these two situations: they can often identify their buyers but not trace their full contact history.
VisualIQ, founded in 2005 as Connexion.a, proposes to straddle these worlds by combining aggregate-level models with customer-specific contact history. They haven’t found a magic bullet: like everyone else, VisualIQ tracks online customers through cookies, with all the limits that implies. But VisualIQ strives to make the best use of what’s available by unifying data from as many online campaigns as possible, linking cookies with online transactions, and then linking online transactions to offline identities.
This approach offers some general advantages and two specific capabilities. The general advantages come from assembling all advertising and customer transaction information in one database. This allows VisualIQ to analyze campaign results, do whatever identity matching is possible, and to isolate the impact of source, contact frequency, demographics, location and other variables. VisualIQ, a hosted service, has invested heavily in technology to analyze massive data sets along such dimensions.
The first specific capability is relating pre-purchase contacts to actual purchases for individual customers, thus moving beyond last-click attribution. Although this is subject to the limits of cookie-based tracking, VisualIQ does what it can to build a unified identity by sharing the same cookie IDs across as many online channels as possible. The second capability is building mix models with data from actual customer contacts instead of market-level estimates or surveys. VisualIQ says it has found this yields more accurate results than traditional information.
This is all good stuff and VisualIQ has packaged it nicely in a tiered set of offerings. These range from campaign-level reporting to customer-based insights to predictive modeling and simulation, with prices for the simplest system starting as low as $5,000 to $10,000 per month. The company has had considerable success, counting major banks, retailers, and communications firms as clients. Note that these are all industries that sell to their customers directly.
But VisualIQ’s specific offerings are just part of the story. What’s really important is setting explicit goals of linking identities across channels and measuring cross-channel marketing impacts. These are arguably the core challenges in marketing measurement today. This focus has led VisualIQ to look for alternatives to cookies and to use existing methods to combine online and offline information for the same person.
The company is also seeking to make it easier to apply its results. Today, it basically generates reports that suggest better media allocations and advertising contents. But it is working to automatically feed those findings as rules into execution systems such as ad servers and ad exchanges. This brings marketers closer to the ultimate goal of self-optimizing programs. Other vendors are also pursuing self-optimization, but VisualIQ promises the advantage of decisions based on data from all channels rather than a single channel or, heaven forbid, just the last click.