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Fusing two worlds into one
Teradata builds a partnership ecosystem to integrate Web data in the warehouse.
by Lori Janies
A retailer that sells telco products online and in brick-and-mortar stores wants to determine the best way to boost sales of a particular model of cell phone. The company uses a Web analytics vendor to track its online sales, customer behaviors and trends. It also has a data warehouse that integrates large amounts of traditional sales, marketing and customer information.
Though each channel yields valuable information, the lack of integration leaves many questions unanswerable: Did an online ad or targeted e-mail spur the purchase of the cell phone at the brick-and-mortar store? Was the customer who bought a cell phone online responding to offline information or marketing? Do customers who fail to buy in one channel ultimately buy in the other? If so, how often? Why or why not? To try to manually pull enough information together to answer even one of these questions would be laborious and time-consuming.
However, with the company’s data warehouse configured and optimized to incorporate and analyze Web data, the source is more complete, and marketing can quickly glean more well-rounded information from it. Besides the more traditional data they can get from customer loyalty programs, billing and credit card information, they now have access to online information. The data generated from customer click-throughs, Web site purchasing and browsing information, blogs, and social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace can add insight on a customer. By analyzing this data together, marketing can better adapt the company’s campaigns to boost cell phone and other product sales.
Eliminate the blind spots
Like the retailer that sells telco products, most organizations have mechanisms in place to track their customers’ online and offline behaviors. But, historically, integrating Web data and traditional business data has been difficult, so many companies are not currently set up to track and analyze customer behaviors between channels. Therefore, these organizations have enormous blind spots when they try to determine the efficacy of marketing campaigns in either channel or hone their communication plans and strategies.
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To help remove these blind spots, Teradata has formed partnerships with Webtrends, a top Web analytics consulting firm, and Speed-Trap, a specialty Web data extract, transform and load (ETL) solution provider, to offer an easy, effective way to integrate Web data in the warehouse.
These partnerships enable integrated data that companies can use to analyze trends and customer behaviors across online and offline channels:
- Webtrends, a global leader in Web analytics, provides a broad suite of reporting and analytics tools to capture and analyze Web data. With the purpose-built adapter offered by Teradata, data is transferred from the Webtrends server to the data warehouse. Technical support and expertise is jointly provided by Teradata and Webtrends to ensure the adapter’s successful implementation and ongoing optimization.
- Speed-Trap is a unique software provider that offers a product that uses Web 2.0 technology to capture traditional and non-traditional Web data. These include HTML, flash and data from a variety of interfaces, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants and gaming consoles. With Speed-Trap, companies can track all of the interactions of a Web site visitor from the individual’s own browser and transfer the data, in near real time, to the data warehouse for detailed analytics.
Working with Teradata, these partners and others are part of an expanding, Web-focused ecosystem of solutions. Together, the various components enable customers to quickly and easily access information that was previously unavailable or extremely difficult and time-consuming to access.
In addition to Webtrends, Teradata has also developed adapters for other Web analytics vendors, such as Omniture, Coremetrics and Google Analytics, as well as for search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, to bring valuable Web behavior data into the warehouse. Teradata is also reaching out to other innovative software companies that offer new ways to capture data from the ever-growing number of online sources, including social networking and advertising sites.
As the global leader in data warehousing, Teradata brings its extensive expertise in innovation and analytical solution development to these partnerships to help companies fast-track their Web data integration projects. A Teradata Integrated Web Intelligence offer project—usually completed in fewer than 10 weeks—can yield multiple benefits:
- Provide a complete, 360-degree view of customer behaviors and trends
- Improve customer acquisition capabilities with vastly improved targeting techniques
- Increase revenue across all channels through better-informed marketing campaigns
- Save time and money through better insight into marketing channel effectiveness and media mix optimization
With access to integrated online and offline data from their data warehouse, organizations can easily identify their customers’ behaviors across channels and use that information to better serve them. Companies can also create improved marketing campaigns, based on newly recognized trends from both sources, that are certain to boost sales and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty into the future.
Lori Janies writes about business and technology for various publications.