Short of turbocharging the IT infrastructure, how do you deal with the flood of big data? First, let go of the misconception that you have to collect everything, said Grover. “It’s more about taking sips from the water hose, just what’s relevant for the question you are trying to ask. It’s about refining the data process and getting to those interesting bits of information that hold the greatest value in your online data.” For more info: www.nafcu.org/sas

1. Analytics in Real-Time Online Marketing
CONCLUSIONS PAPER
Insights from a webinar presented by SAS for the Direct Marketing Association
Featuring:
Suneel Grover,
Solutions Architect, Integrated Marketing Analytics, SAS

2. SAS Conclusions Paper
Table of Contents
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Why Real-Time Online Insights Have Been Elusive. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Understanding the Multidimensional Customer Experience . . . . . . . 3
Three Keys to Unlock the Value in Your Online Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Key 1: Collect and own your granular data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
. .
Key 2: Automate the preprocessing of data for marketing and
analytics.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Key 3: Apply advanced analytics in a marketing automation
environment.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Closing Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
For More Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Suneel Grover is a Solutions Architect focused in integrated marketing, advanced analytics and
customer intelligence at SAS, as well as an adjunct instructor in the Masters of Science program
in Integrated Marketing at New York University (NYU). Before joining SAS, he worked in offline and
online marketing analytics for brands such as MetLife, Citi and Navy Federal for 12 years. Grover
holds a MBA focused in decision science from The George Washington University, and an MS
focused in integrated marketing analytics from New York University (NYU-SCPS).

3. Analytics in Real-Time Online Marketing
Introduction
Imagine you’re visiting a retailer’s website to shop for an oven. There are myriad ways
to arrive at the site: clicking an ad on another Web page, following a link from a social
media post, selecting a product in an auction or review site, or typing the retailer’s name
in a search engine – an organic search.
If you don’t get sidetracked by the special offers, weekly deals and Deals of the Day
on the home page and category portal pages, you might navigate to “Products,”
“Appliances,” or “Ranges and Ovens.” If you don’t get distracted there by the offers for
holiday discounts, free shipping, rewards points, reduced-price overstock items and
financing options, you might navigate to “Wall Ovens,” then choose single or dual ovens “With one line of tag code, your
or microwave/oven combos.
Web analytics solution could
Then you might narrow your selection to browse by brand, price range, capacity, color, capture all user interactions
customer ratings and desired features. Once you have selected models that appeal on your website, automatically
to you, you can compare them side by side, read customer reviews, and investigate
perform real-time data
options and pricing details.
collection and preparation for
Then, if you don’t get distracted checking availability and reading about free shipping analytics, then trigger analytic
and other incentives, you might end up adding an oven to your virtual shopping cart.
and reporting exercises –
More likely, you’ll put the decision on hold, give it some thought, look at other options
and revisit the site later. ultimately triggering a highly
relevant marketing decision in
The point is, every shopping visit presents many potential paths to navigate from your
time to influence the customer
initial interest to the sale. Every click tells the retailer a little bit about your motivations
and what you want to achieve. Where were you before you came to the site? Are you before he/she leaves the online
partial to a certain brand? Are you particularly price-conscious? Looking for maximum session.”
convenience? Immediate gratification?
Suneel Grover,
Solutions Architect, Integrated Marketing
If you were shopping for this oven in the store, a savvy sales person would use these
Analytics, SAS
clues to help make the deal more attractive. What if you could do the same for your
customers’ online shopping experience, automatically using these clues to help close
the deal? You can.
1

4. SAS Conclusions Paper
Why Real-Time Online Insights Have Been Elusive
Website tracking is nothing new. Organizations with a Web presence have been
tracking traffic through hits, clicks and page views for many years. However, retailers
need more than that now. They need to be able to assess visitor activity on the website
while there’s still time to influence that behavior – to create the most compelling online
experience, tailored to each unique visitor.
Several challenges stand in the way of that ideal:
• The relative inflexibility of website tags. To track users’ interactions as they
come to your digital property, whatever the digital channel, you need to uniquely
tag that event. A website tag is essential to gain insight into website usage
behavior. “As digital properties become ever more complex and diverse – and
with the dynamic nature of marketing – the tagging exercise becomes more
difficult and cumbersome,” said Suneel Grover, Solutions Architect for Integrated
Marketing Analytics at SAS.
• Lack of timely detail at the individual visitor level. Typically, the brand partners
with a Web analytics provider that collects website statistics based on tags and
supplies a business intelligence (BI) portal that enables its customers to view
website activity for the last few hours or days. However, the insights are rolled up
into summaries and reported long after the visitor has left the site.
• Inability to merge online and offline data. “Website analytics providers actually
own the digital data stream, and they may have hundreds or thousands of clients
to provide for,” said Grover. “So getting the data can be very difficult. Some
vendors provide a batch option to get the data to you in the next day or couple
of days, but what if you want to make a decision that uses newly acquired
information in real time, during the visitor’s session?”
These limitations are building to a crisis point. Ask marketing professionals from any
industry to name their most pressing challenges with Web analytics and most will point
to marketing attribution (difficulty determining which marketing actions and channels
contributed to the sale) more than anything else – followed closely by issues with visitor
segmentation and data integration.
“These are classic advanced analytics exercises, nothing more,” said Grover. These
challenges can be overcome with immediate access to right-time behavioral data. “At
SAS, we look at digital channel data just like any other data stream. It is where you’re
going to find competitive advantage, but for many retailers, it just has not been an option.”
2

5. Analytics in Real-Time Online Marketing
Understanding the Multidimensional Customer Experience
“The value of data for customer insight isn’t just in viewing your customer or prospect
through a digital lens,” said Grover. “The value is when you can create the proverbial
360-degree view, and that requires stitching together that online data with your offline
data stream.”
That digital data must be cleansed and prepared to be analysis-ready. To do a deeper
analysis, you need the flexibility to apply a range of analytic techniques to that data,
usually in an iterative fashion. And you need to be able to feed the results of marketing
decisions back into the insight loop for continuous improvement. All of these must-haves
call for greater autonomy and control over the data, more than just having a third-party
analytics vendor toss data without business context over the wall to you every day or two.
Trouble is, even the offline data can be messy, said Grover. “As an analyst in both the
offline and online perspectives before I came to SAS, my mornings would start with a
very specific question from my manager or director. The sophistication of that question
could be low or high, but ultimately, I would begin by referring to data that looked like a
junkyard.
“My leaders wanted me to create a meaningful decision from that data, but I’d spend
so much time trying to get the needed pieces of information. There was nothing
integrated about it; it was very ad hoc. Because of the ad hoc nature of the process,
exploration and analysis didn’t just take an hour or two, it could take days or weeks.
There’s no room for this type of inefficiency in a real-time marketing environment.”
Delays are becoming even more common as data volumes continue to expand. IT
systems and processes may already be stressed with offline data volumes and the
need to generate rapid insights, said Grover. “As marketers get more curious and
recognize the incremental value of having access to more information for analytic
exercises, that creates bigger and bigger data, and that can be intimidating.
“There’s no reason to fret, because big data is just a relative term. It refers to the point
where the volume, velocity and variety of data exceed an organization’s storage or
compute capacity to use that data for accurate and timely decision making. If your team
or organization is starting to become frustrated with the time it takes to execute an
analytical exercise, then you have big data.”
Short of turbocharging the IT infrastructure, how do you deal with the flood of big data?
First, let go of the misconception that you have to collect everything, said Grover. “It’s
more about taking sips from the water hose, just what’s relevant for the question you are
trying to ask. It’s about refining the data process and getting to those interesting bits of
information that hold the greatest value in your online data.”
3

6. SAS Conclusions Paper
Three Keys to Unlock the Value in Your Online Data
If your organization is looking at a data junkyard that only gets bigger and more complex
over time, how do you get to those interesting bits of information? How do you get
to the point where online and offline data are integrated, clean, analysis-ready and
transformed into immediate insights? It takes three “master keys” to unlock the full
potential of your data for online marketing, said Grover:
1. Proprietary access without latency to granular online data. The brand,
organization or department should be able to collect and own its online
information at a detail level. The more detail, the better.
2. Automated preprocessing of data. Once organizations have access to their
online data, they need to streamline and automate the preparation of this data
for marketing and analysis.
3. Advanced analytics and marketing automation. Organizations that achieve
the first two master keys can apply the recommendations of advanced
predictive analytics and business rules to optimize their online presence and By combining detailed online
marketing decisions.
customer behavior data with
customer data from other
Key 1: Collect and immediately access granular data.
offline channels, you get a more
Build a complete customer view with an integrated marketing data table.
complete view of the customer
A complete customer view starts with identifying information from the customer
relationship management (CRM) system, such as name, gender, age and other and a better understanding
information customers have offered. of customer behavior, which
translates into more successful
To that CRM data, you add psychographic lifestyle enrichment data to build out more
context for the customer view – elements such as life stage, household income, offers and campaigns.
children, education, value score and propensity – usually from third-party data or based
on customer zip code.
To that, add online history data, such as visit recency, session count, session average
page views and engagement scores. However, organizations might not have access to
historical Web activity from their current Web analytics provider, or the data might arrive
in a batch format a day or two after the fact.
Collect and access online data in real time, without the need for traditional
website tagging. “The real gem in all of this online data is the ability to access and
integrate current Web session visitor data with customer CRM, lifestyle and Web
behavior history.” said Grover. “If I’m on your website, and I click from the home
page to a third page, where I show interest in a unique piece of information, that
action differentiates me from other visitors. If that information is made available and
stitched together with these other streams in real time, the organization could deploy
personalized marketing before I leave the session. When you think about RFM (recency,
frequency and monetary), it doesn’t get any more recent and relevant than that.”
4

7. Analytics in Real-Time Online Marketing
The digital data collection process includes three elements:
• Dynamic data collection. Real-time data collection is now possible without Patented dynamic data
the need for complex site tagging. Instruments using only a single line insert (as collection technology from
opposed to individual form field tagging), data can be collected down to the SAS involves just a single line
individual keystroke and mouse-over level.
of JavaScript-based code,
• Dynamic content recognition. It is now possible to automatically collect all
online activity – for subscribers or anonymous visitors – with accuracy, timed to rather than the intensive Web
the millisecond. “If you collect data from all interactions on each page, you won’t analytics tagging required by
fall into the problem of realizing later that you missed some useful behaviors you traditional solutions – enabling
should have been tracking,” said Grover. “You’re collecting everything up front.”
significant time savings,
• Dynamic collection rules. The system can be adapted to collect the level of
detail that meets the organization’s privacy policies. rapid development, reduced
maintenance and improved
Grover demonstrated this dynamic data collection process in action with a simulated
data-driven marketing.
visit to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) annual conference website. As he
entered organic search terms, clicked links on the DMA website and typed entries into
a registration form, each action was dynamically captured and displayed in a tracking
window – even though he had not logged into the site as a recognized repeat visitor.
This rich data set provides detailed insight into customer (or prospect) behavior.
Key 2: Automate the preprocessing of data for marketing and analytics.
In the typical path from data to decision, about 80 percent of time is spent accessing
and preparing data, with less than 20 percent of the time spent actually analyzing the
data to support the marketing decision. What if you could flip those numbers?
“You can prebuild data preparation assets and operationalize them,” said Grover.
“Build it once – define the steps to take very raw Web behavior data and prepare it for
a marketing analytics exercise – and then automate it. When you have ownership of
Prebuilt information manage­
the digital data stream, you can tie that information with offline data streams focused
on the individual level.” ment processes prepare the
raw Web event data. Simple
For example, the system can monitor website activity against identified business
configuration adapts these
goals, such as attendee registration (for the DMA 2012 example used in the webinar).
“I clicked on ‘Attendee Registration.’ Since the DMA is very interested in this, this processes from your sites
information can be rolled up and made available for subsequent analysis and targeted regardless of technology
outbound or inbound marketing.”
or structure. The result is
Grover showed a specific example where the system tracked his repeat visits to the rich customer-centric digital
attendee registration page – what he did and when. This information could be used to data ready for analysis and
tailor the view on subsequent visits, to give just the right incentive to get the visitor to
marketing.
register.
5

8. SAS Conclusions Paper
Key 3: Apply advanced analytics in a marketing automation environment.
Most organizations use analytic techniques to solve business problems specific
to their departments, but they could get much richer insights if they used multiple “You may think it takes a really
analytic techniques and broader context, said Grover. For instance, business analytics long time to run an advanced
is not about using one approach to solve problems. It is about accessing an array
analytics algorithm when you
of approaches from an analytical workbench that allows organizations to leverage
data mining, forecasting, text analytics, and optimization to arrive at more accurate have thousands, hundreds of
solutions for complex online and offline consumer behavior. thousands or millions of visitors.
You can dynamically run these
“Multiple analytic techniques should be pulled together for the greater good,” said
Grover. Decision trees, two-step models, survival analysis to understand retention analytical algorithms on one
and churn, association/sequence analysis to understand acquisition and cross-sell visitor in the moment, which
opportunities, clustering for segmentation… all of these techniques can support a
creates an opportunity to be
variety of targeted and effective marketing decisions. “Once you actually own and
have access to detailed digital information at the customer level, all of these analytic truly relevant.”
techniques are fair game. And when you can stitch together in the online information
Suneel Grover,
with the offline information you’ve already been pumping into these approaches, these Solutions Architect, Integrated Marketing
models become significantly more powerful, because you now have a more complete Analytics, SAS
view of your prospect or customer.”
A marketing execution can use both outbound and inbound marketing automation
technology to determine which online user behavior paths (and associated key
behaviors) trigger which analytical models to run, which in turn can trigger automated
decisions about which real-time (and batch) offers to make. The end game for
marketers who want to leverage data-driven insights is the ability to use a predictive
model’s customer or prospect probability score that works with your communication
business rules to make a better decision about whom to target, what to target them
with, and with which message and channel. For example, the DMA 2012 website Real-time decision making
can determine that since Grover visited the attendee registration page three times in can increase the precision of
three session visits, he is interested but reluctant, which could automatically trigger a
offers by looking at not only
remarketing online display ad with an incentive, such as a discount on the registration fee.
the products that an individual
customer has recently
Closing Thoughts purchased and other key
What if every time customers interacted with your Web properties, they got exactly customer information, but also
what they needed or wanted, in a minimum number of clicks, with a minimum amount
by looking at what the customer
of time spent on your website? What if every customer received the most appropriate
message or offer, based on deep knowledge of his/her previous interactions with the is currently exploring on the
organization, both online and offline? What if this interaction could be tailored based on website or has placed in an
information you gain right now, such as which products the customer is exploring on
online shopping basket.
the website or has placed in a shopping basket?
You can. The technology to get this insight automatically is available now:
• Capture all Web interactions in real time, without cumbersome site tagging.
• Integrate online and offline data to create a more complete view of the customer.
6

9. Analytics in Real-Time Online Marketing
• Transform the stream of data from online and offline channels into accurate,
• Collect and profile. Effortlessly
predictive insights.
obtain online data, synthesize it
• Deliver targeted, relevant and timely outbound offers to customers based on those with the offline data and build a
holistic insights. customer profile.
• Achieve true relevance by personalizing the interaction to the individual customer,
• Take the best action. Make
right now.
better decisions based on
Timely relevance works. Just ask some of the world’s most successful online marketers: the customer profile by
triggering automated targeted
• A global retail bank increased target audience numbers by 500 percent at the communications.
same time it cut its online media spending by 10 percent.
• Optimize. Measure the response
• A global insurer doubled customer engagement in just three months.
to the targeted communications
• In four weeks, a global financial services company gained insight that two Web to learn and enhance future
analytics vendors couldn’t deliver in two years, saving millions on unnecessary communications.
infrastructure costs.
• An online retailer implemented event triggers that will deliver a 1-2 percent
reduction in abandonment that will result in additional revenue of $12.5 million a
year.
• A large airline identified a segment of frequent flyers to one city that could be
targeted with multiflight offers, resulting in millions in increased revenue.
For any organization that views its Web properties as serious commerce channels,
results such as these are definitely interesting bits of information worth unlocking.
For More Information
For more about SAS® Adaptive Customer Experience:
sas.com/software/customer-intelligence/adaptive-customer-experience.html
To download the free SAS white paper, The Power of Personalizing the Customer
Experience: http://go.sas.com/6wm37m
To read more thought leaders’ views on marketing, visit the SAS Customer Intelligence
Knowledge Exchange: sas.com/knowledge-exchange/customer-intelligence
To get fresh perspectives on customer analytics from marketing practitioners
on the Customer Analytics blog:
blogs.sas.com/content/customeranalytics
7

10. About SAS
SAS is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market.
Through innovative solutions, SAS helps customers at more than 60,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better
decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW ® For more information on
.
SAS® Business Analytics software and services, visit sas.com.
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