Solution Opportunity – Be a Pre-Production Client

Analytics · By On · 1 Comment

I have a unique oppor­tu­nity that I would like to offer to a lim­ited num­ber of read­ers of my blog.

A small team and I have been work­ing on a solu­tion to make clas­si­fi­ca­tions eas­ier and faster for clients.  This solu­tion will have advanced fea­tures that will auto­mate clas­si­fi­ca­tions, increase accu­racy of reports and save hun­dreds or thou­sands of hours of your time.

The Solu­tion

Part 1 — Cam­paign Gen­er­a­tion Tool

This is a small light­weight tool that any­one in your com­pany can use.  Even part­ners or con­sult­ing firms out­side of your com­pany can use the tool.  The idea is sim­ple; when some­one needs to gen­er­ate a cam­paign ID it can take any­where from 10 min to 30 min to gen­er­ate a sin­gle cam­paign ID and upload the clas­si­fi­ca­tion data.  So we built a light­weight desk­top appli­ca­tion any user can quickly enter in a cou­ple pieces of infor­ma­tion and gen­er­ate the cam­paign ID auto­mat­i­cally.  What used to take 15 min on aver­age will now take 15 sec­onds, not to men­tion the tool auto­mat­i­cally uploads the clas­si­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion to Site­Cat­a­lyst so you don’t need to worry about it.

Fea­tures:

  • Abil­ity to quickly cre­ate cam­paign IDs.
  • Auto­mat­i­cally upload cam­paign clas­si­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion to Site Catalyst.
  • For use by any­one who needs to cre­ate cam­paign IDs.

Part 2 — Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Man­age­ment System

The clas­si­fi­ca­tion man­age­ment sys­tem is the heavy lift­ing tool that is designed to be used by your ana­lysts.  The tool is designed to pull down clas­si­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion from SAINT and give the ana­lyst an inter­face to quickly man­age all clas­si­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion.  For exam­ple, the ana­lyst can quickly pull down the prod­ucts clas­si­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion and iden­tify which prod­ucts are not clas­si­fied.  The ana­lyst can also see which prod­ucts might be miss­ing infor­ma­tion such as the manufacturer.

There are also advanced server side fea­tures that are part of the Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Man­age­ment Sys­tem.  You will be able to setup rules inside the sys­tem that can run on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.  These rules can auto-classify your data, sav­ing you hun­dreds of hours a year.  This is one of the most excit­ing fea­tures of the entire system!

Fea­tures:

  • Abil­ity to down­load clas­si­fi­ca­tion data from SiteCatalyst
  • Fil­ter clas­si­fi­ca­tion data for quick and easy editing
  • Bulk update data with rules that run in the sys­tem or server side.

The Ben­e­fits

If the ben­e­fits are not clear already then let’s do some sim­ple math.

A smaller com­pany can eas­ily spend 2 to 4 hours a week cre­at­ing and man­ag­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tion data. Let’s esti­mate that an ana­lyst costs a com­pany about $100/hour.

(4 hours a week) x (52 weeks in a year) x ($100/hour) = $20,800/year

These num­bers are for a smaller com­pany, I talk to com­pa­nies on a reg­u­lar basis that eas­ily spend over 10 hours a week deal­ing with clas­si­fi­ca­tion data.  These larger com­pa­nies can (and have) saved hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars when they find a way to man­age their clas­si­fi­ca­tion data.

The above cal­cu­la­tion does not take into con­sid­er­a­tion the best part!  The ana­lysts now have hun­dreds of extra hours to do what they do best, make the com­pany more money!

We Want You

We have built an Alpha ver­sion of the solu­tion and we need pre-production clients to help us define all the final fea­tures and prove there is client inter­est in this solution.

As a thank you for help­ing us build the solu­tion and being a pre-production client, we will offer the solu­tion to you at a huge discount.

Qual­i­fi­ca­tions:

  • Spend more than 2 hours a week man­ag­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tion data.
  • Have over 4 peo­ple who need to gen­er­ate cam­paign codes
    • Note: if you are cur­rently email­ing a sin­gle per­son and hav­ing them gen­er­ate cam­paign codes then the num­ber above is for any­one who needs to use the code not the sin­gle per­son who gen­er­ates the code.

What to do next?

If you are inter­ested in becom­ing a pre-production client then email me directly ( pearce (at) adobe​.com) with the fol­low­ing information.

  • Your name
  • Your company
  • Why you are inter­ested in this solution
  • What fea­tures you are most inter­ested in.

The team will review each appli­ca­tion.  If you qual­ify to be a pre-production client then we will setup a call to dis­cuss more specif­i­cally the solu­tion and fea­tures you are most inter­ested in.

As always, post your com­ments or e-mail me at Pearce (at) adobe​.com.  It is your com­ments and e-mails that keep me post­ing and give me ideas for future posts.

  • http://www.jasonegan.net Jason Egan

    Pearce, you should have NO prob­lem prov­ing that there’s a client inter­est in this solu­tion. Being a con­sul­tant and hav­ing been on the analyst-side being the one that main­tained a ton of SAINT spread­sheets, this is a much needed solu­tion that will make a ton of Omni­ture cus­tomers very happy. Clas­si­fi­ca­tions in gen­eral have always been a dif­fer­en­tia­tor for Site­Cat­a­lyst com­pared to other ana­lyt­ics plat­forms, and extended it in this way will only help you fur­ther extend that fea­ture gap between you and your com­peti­tors. My only require­ments (hopes) for such a solu­tion would be:

    1. The abil­ity to parse a string and split it at a delim­iter to place into dif­fer­ent clas­si­fi­ca­tions
    2. Basic if/else rules sim­i­lar to what works now for Site­Cat­a­lyst 15’s pro­cess­ing rules.
    3. The abil­ity to cre­ate Regex-based rules for the more advanced users of the tool
    4. If this is an app, the abil­ity to sync on a reg­u­lar basis with a locally or networked-stored SAINT map­ping file when rules can’t clas­sify some­thing based on a string value (like prod­uct IDs)
    5. Inte­gra­tion with the SAINT clas­si­fi­ca­tions of the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel report (or any other Omni­ture solu­tions that can/will have SAINT clas­si­fi­ca­tions).
    6. The abil­ity to create/edit/delete clas­si­fi­ca­tions from within the tool, as opposed to hav­ing to go into the admin console

    Also, I’m on the Site­Cat­a­lyst CAB, and have been hound­ing those guys for a cou­ple of years for a solu­tion like this :) Proof again that you guys lis­ten to your cus­tomers and let them drive the direc­tion of your prod­uct road map.