A Seattle-based data warehousing and data mining ASP (application service provider) added analysis for marketing campaigns functionally on Monday.
The add-on service, dubbed Campaign Response Analytics (CRA), can be used to identify which marketing tactics are successful, thereby increasing the efficiency of marketing and advertising campaigns, as well as improving customer acquisition and loyalty, according to Nick Besbeas, vice president and co-founder of Digimine.
“We’ve picked up a set of metrics that customers are interested in,” Besbeas said.
Those metrics include data on a variety of marketing points such as offline ads, banner ads, e-mail, incentive offers, and direct mail, with the goal of helping customers decide which are most effective.
CRA works in conjunction with Digimine’s data warehousing and mining service to essentially run marketing campaign reports against the hosted warehouse, then deliver them to the customer.
The end result: Customers no longer need to cobble together reports to judge the success of campaigns.
Other vendors offer campaign management products; Blue Martini Software announced a package earlier this month and Seibel enables the capability through a relationship with business intelligence vendor Business Objects. BEA Systems also released a package on Monday that helps customers not only measure the effectiveness of campaigns but also act upon these reports. Digimine, however, is the one of the few to offer a hosted version.
While a number of big name vendors – including IBM and SAS Institute – are behind it, the idea of hosted analytics hasn’t exactly spread like wildfire just yet.
A survey conducted by market research firm IDC Framingham, Mass., shows that fewer than 5 percent of respondents currently use an ASP for hosting data warehouses or mining tools.
Analytics said that new services, such as CRA, make the hosted approach more attractive.
“A lot of people are fed up with the high cost of data warehousing,” said Peter Urban, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston. New services on top of warehousing and mining represents a shift in the market for hosted analytics, he added.
“Just analyze Web logs is not enough. Customers need a big-picture view of things,” Urban said. “There are a lot of point Web log vendors out there, and a lot of them won’t make it.”
Tom Sullivan is a senior writer at InfoWorld.
By: Tom Sullivan
Source: Info World
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