Hello, domfreedom-ga
The primary benefit of data harvesting (or data mining) is to gain a
better understanding and profile of an online company's individual
site visitors so that products and services can be geared toward
potential repeat customers in a more efficient manner. There are many
different methods for harvesting and analyzing data, but the primary
reasons are basically the same when it comes to gathering customer
information.
"The sooner you start learning from your data, the sooner you can
leave your competitors in the dust."
http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/01/greening/
AN OVERVIEW
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"By this point in time, you've probably heard a good deal about data
mining -- the database industry's latest buzzword. What's this trend
all about? To use a simple analogy, it's finding the proverbial
needle in the haystack. In this case, the needle is that single piece
of intelligence your business needs and the haystack is the large data
warehouse you've built up over a long period of time."
"Through the use of automated statistical analysis (or "data mining")
techniques,
**
businesses are discovering new trends and patterns of behavior that
previously went unnoticed. Once they've uncovered this vital
intelligence, it can be used in a predictive manner for a variety of
applications...The Bank of Montreal's business intelligence and
knowledge discovery program is used to gain insight into customer
behavior. CIO Magazine provides a great executive overview of data
mining for business-minded professionals."
**
"The first step toward building a productive data mining program is,
of course, to gather data! Most businesses already perform these data
gathering tasks to some extent -- the key here is to locate the data
critical to your business, refine it and prepare it for the data
mining process."
(Read entire article if you are interested in the various data mining
techniques)
From "Data Mining: An Introduction." Databases with Mike Chapple.
http://databases.about.com/library/weekly/aa100700a.htm
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***
"Data mining software allows users to analyze large databases to solve
business decision problems."
***
"Data mining is, in some ways, an extension of statistics, with a few
artificial intelligence and machine learning twists thrown in. Like
statistics, data mining is not a business solution, it is just a
technology.
* For example, consider a catalog retailer who needs to decide who
should receive information about a new product. The information
operated on by the data mining process is contained in a historical
database of previous interactions with customers and the features
associated with the customers, such as age, zip code, their responses.
The data mining software would use this historical information to
build a model of customer behavior that could be used to predict which
customers would be likely to respond to the new product.
* By using this information a marketing manager can select only the
customers who are most likely to respond. The operational business
software can then feed the results of the decision to the appropriate
touch point systems (call centers, direct mail, web servers, email
systems, etc.) so that the right customers receive the right offers."
From "What is data mining good for?" Kurt Thearling, Ph.D. Director,
Advanced Data Mining
Capital One http://www.thearling.com/index.htm#wps
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"To use data mining on your Web site, you have to establish and record
visitor and item characteristics, and visitor interactions."
"Visitor characteristics include demographics, psychographics, and
technographics. Demographics are tangible attributes such as home
address, income, purchasing responsibility, or recreational equipment
ownership. Psychographics are personality types that might be revealed
in a psychological survey, such as highly protective feelings toward
children (commonly called "gatekeeper moms"), impulse-buying
tendencies, early technology interest, and so on. Technographics are
attributes of the visitor's system, such as operating system, browser,
domain, and modem speed. If you have a phone number or address, you
can sometimes obtain household demographic or psychographic
information through direct marketing service providers, such as
Webcraft or Acxiom.
"When visitors interact with your site, they provide information about
themselves and how they respond to your content: which links visitors
click, where they spend most of their time, which search terms they
use, and when they browse. Some visitors may even fill out a lifestyle
survey or provide names and addresses."
***
"A website that has users fill out an online form can tailor the
questions so that the information gathered will help the busines to
use the information in realizing specific goals.
***
"On sites where visitors register, advertisers can target on the basis
of demographics. For example, people living in different parts of the
country or visiting different Web sites may have differing
propensities to purchase sports-team-branded apparel, gay travel
tours, or discount car parts. Therefore, if you target the people most
likely to purchase your product, you can reduce your cost for an ad
campaign and increase the total profit."
From "Data Mining on the Web," by Dan R. Greening. New Architect
(2000)
http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/01/greening/
UNDERSTANDING YOUR WEB VISITORS CAN LEAD TO BETTER MARKETING DECISIONS
=======================================================================
"According to analysts, corporate decision makers can use the Web's
new tools to collect customer data and interact with customers."
The challenge is for a company to tie that Web data into its existing
information to create a unified view of each customer, fueling better
business decisions.
"One of the key trends in this whole area is understanding all the
different ways customers are touching your organization, which at a
big company can mean dozens if not hundreds of places, and then
consolidating that data into a panoramic view of the customer," said
David Folger, senior program director at the Meta Group, in
Pleasanton, Calif.
"The next step is getting that information to the marketing folks so
they can understand it and make decisions."
From "A recipe for e-commerce - Business intelligence and Web data
harvesting merge," by Michael Lattig. InfoWorld. (3/2000)
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0IFW/11_22/60087146/print.jhtml
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"The future will be won by firms that harvest data online." Press
Release. Global Data Management ( March 2002)
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2002/7/prweb42432.htm
The future will be won by firms that harvest data online.
That's the view of Global Data Management's Managing Director Mr
Dominic Yeadon, who has a passion for Data Harvesting and recognises
the exponential growth in marketing opportunities from the Internet -
particularly in capturing and storing the millions of records typed in
online every hour, whenever a web visitor completes a web form.
"They could be asking for a brochure or logging in to download, it's
all data and most of it is going to waste. This data is precious, and
failing to collect it just doesn't make any sense, does it?"
"When a customer walks into a car showroom, the professional salesman
does his level best to get a name and address - they know their
Marketing Department is hungry for the data. It should be the same
online, but it isn't. Every day, millions of leads slip through the
net and never end up in the Marketing Database. I speak to major
corporates who haven't got this sorted out yet, where one department
doesn't harvest online leads, whilst another department tries to buy
in e-mail addresses for online marketing because the company doesn't
have any of their own! If only they harvested the leads from their
website they would build the most powerful strategic marketing asset
around.
"Anyone involved with the Internet is still on a steep learning curve.
Everybody needs a few disciplines when operating online. One key
discipline is to harvest data. Data is the most under-valued asset
most companies have. How you exploit the opportunities locked inside
that data is up to you, but at least collect it."
All marketing is moving online. Online marketing needs data, so you
need to harvest data. The future will be won by firms that understand
this.
As specialists in online data management, GDM provides an online
monthly subscription service that can collect data from any form on
any website - the service is called Data Harvesting.
For serious companies who intend to thrive online, it's not a matter
of 'if they harvest', it's 'when they harvest'.
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A Skillsoft Course Description describes the benefits of data mining:
"From welcoming a returning customer back to your Web site to making
special offers to your most loyal customers, data mining can help you
treat your customers with the personalized service they've come to
expect."
http://www.skillsoft.com/corporate/curicula/EBUS0113A2.htm
SOME GOALS FOR USING GATHERED DATA
==================================
Data mining works best when you have clear, measurable goals. The
following are some goals you might consider:
Increase average page views per session;
Increase average profit per checkout;
Decrease products returned;
Increase number of referred customers;
Increase brand awareness;
Increase retention rate (such as number of visitors that have returned
within 30 days);
Reduce clicks-to-close (average page views to accomplish a purchase or
obtain desired information);
Increase conversion rate (checkouts per visit).
Data harvesting can also help companies "target advertisements,
personalize Web pages, create Web pages that show products often
bought together, classify articles automatically, characterize groups
of similar visitors, estimate missing data, and predict future
behavior
(For more in-depth information, please read entire article referenced
below)
From "Data Mining on the Web," by Dan R. Greening. New Architect
(2000)
http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/01/greening/
==
ADDITIONAL READING:
"An Introduction to Data Mining - Discovering hidden value in your
data warehouse
http://www.thearling.com/text/dmwhite/dmwhite.htm
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I hope this information helps! As always, if you need further
clarification, don't hesitate to ask and I will help if I can.
umiat
Search Strategy
data harvesting benefits
web customer "data harvesting"
+benefits of data mining
web form data harvesting
using web forms for information |
