Digging Up Dollars With Data Mining - An Executive's Guide

Traditionally, organizations use data tactically - to manage operations. For a competitive edge, strong organizations use data strategically - to expand the business, to improve profitability, to reduce costs, and to market more effectively. Data mining (DM) creates information assets that an organization can leverage to achieve these strategic objectives.

In this article, we address some of the key questions executives have about data mining. These include:

    What is data mining?
    What can it do for my organization?
    How can my organization get started?

Business Definition of Data Mining

Data mining is a new component in an enterprise's decision support system (DSS) architecture. It complements and interlocks with other DSS capabilities such as query and reporting, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), data visualization, and traditional statistical analysis. These other DSS technologies are generally retrospective. They provide reports, tables, and graphs of what happened in the past. A user who knows what she's looking for can answer specific questions like: "How many new accounts were opened in the Midwest region last quarter," "Which stores had the largest change in revenues compared to the same month last year," or "Did we meet our goal of a ten-percent increase in holiday sales?"

We define data mining as "the data-driven discovery and modeling of hidden patterns in large volumes of data." Data mining differs from the retrospective technologies above because it produces models - models that capture and represent the hidden patterns in the data. With it, a user can discover patterns and build models automatically, without knowing exactly what she's looking for. The models are both descriptive and prospective. They address why things happened and what is likely to happen next. A user can pose "what-if" questions to a data-mining model that can not be queried directly from the database or warehouse. Examples include: "What is the expected lifetime value of every customer account," "Which customers are likely to open a money market account," or "Will this customer cancel our service if we introduce fees?"

The information technologies associated with DM are neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, and rule induction. It is outside the scope of this article to elaborate on all of these technologies. Instead, we will focus on business needs and how data mining solutions for these needs can translate into dollars.

Mapping Business Needs to Solutions and Profits

What can data mining do for your organization? In the introduction, we described several strategic opportunities for an organization to use data for advantage: business expansion, profitability, cost reduction, and sales and marketing. Let's consider these opportunities very concretely through several examples where companies successfully applied DM.

Expanding your business: Keystone Financial of Williamsport, PA, wanted to expand their customer base and attract new accounts through a LoanCheck offer. To initiate a loan, a recipient just had to go to a Keystone branch and cash the LoanCheck. Keystone introduced the $5000 LoanCheck by mailing a promotion to existing customers.

The Keystone database tracks about 300 characteristics for each customer. These characteristics include whether the person had already opened loans in the past two years, the number of active credit cards, the balance levels on those cards, and finally whether or not they responded to the $5000 LoanCheck offer. Keystone used data mining to sift through the 300 customer characteristics, find the most significant ones, and build a model of response to the LoanCheck offer. Then, they applied the model to a list of 400,000 prospects obtained from a credit bureau.

By selectively mailing to the best-rated prospects determined by the DM model, Keystone generated $1.6M in additional net income from 12,000 new customers.

Reducing costs: Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield is New York State's largest health insurer. To compete with other healthcare companies, Empire must provide quality service and minimize costs. Attacking costs in the form of fraud and abuse is a cornerstone of Empire's strategy, and it requires considerable investigative skill as well as sophisticated information technology.

The latter includes a data mining application that profiles each physician in the Empire network based on patient claim records in their database. From the profile, the application detects subtle deviations in physician behavior relative to her/his peer group. These deviations are reported to fraud investigators as a "suspicion index." A physician who performs a high number of procedures per visit, charges 40% more per patient, or sees many patients on the weekend would be flagged immediately from the suspicion index score.

What has this DM effort returned to Empire? In the first three years, they realized fraud-and-abuse savings of $29M, $36M, and $39M respectively.

Improving sales effectiveness and profitability: Pharmaceutical sales representatives have a broad assortment of tools for promoting products to physicians. These tools include clinical literature, product samples, dinner meetings, teleconferences, golf outings, and more. Knowing which promotions will be most effective with which doctors is extremely valuable since wrong decisions can cost the company hundreds of dollars for the sales call and even more in lost revenue.

The reps for a large pharmaceutical company collectively make tens of thousands of sales calls. One drug maker linked six months of promotional activity with corresponding sales figures in a database, which they then used to build a predictive model for each doctor. The data-mining models revealed, for instance, that among six different promotional alternatives, only two had a significant impact on the prescribing behavior of physicians. Using all the knowledge embedded in the data-mining models, the promotional mix for each doctor was customized to maximize ROI.

Although this new program was rolled out just recently, early responses indicate that the drug maker will exceed the $1.4M sales increase originally projected. Given that this increase is generated with no new promotional spending, profits are expected to increase by a similar amount.

Looking back at this set of examples, we must ask, "Why was data mining necessary?" For Keystone, response to the loan offer did not exist in the new credit bureau database of 400,000 potential customers. The model predicted the response given the other available customer characteristics. For Empire, the suspicion index quantified the differences between physician practices and peer (model) behavior. Appropriate physician behavior was a multi-variable aggregate produced by data mining - once again, not available in the database. For the drug maker, the promotion and sales databases contained the historical record of activity. An automated data mining method was necessary to model each doctor and determine the best combination of promotions to increase future sales.

Getting Started

In each case presented above, data mining yielded significant benefits to the business. Some were top-line results that increased revenues or expanded the customer base. Others were bottom-line improvements resulting from cost-savings and enhanced productivity. The natural next question is, "How can my organization get started and begin to realize the competitive advantages of DM?"

In our experience, pilot projects are the most successful vehicles for introducing data mining. A pilot project is a short, well-planned effort to bring DM into an organization. Good pilot projects focus on one very specific business need, and they involve business users up front and throughout the project. The duration of a typical pilot project is one to three months, and it generally requires 4 to 10 people part-time.

The role of the executive in such pilot projects is two-pronged. At the outset, the executive participates in setting the strategic goals and objectives for the project. During the project and prior to roll out, the executive takes part by supervising the measurement and evaluation of results. Lack of executive sponsorship and failure to involve business users are two primary reasons DM initiatives stall or fall short.

In reading this article, perhaps you've developed a vision and want to proceed - to address a pressing business problem by sponsoring a data mining pilot project. Twisting the old adage, we say "just because you should doesn't mean you can." Be aware that a capability assessment needs to be an integral component of a DM pilot project. The assessment takes a critical look at data and data access, personnel and their skills, equipment, and software. Organizations typically underestimate the impact of data mining (and information technology in general) on their people, their processes, and their corporate culture. The pilot project provides a relatively high-reward, low-cost, and low-risk opportunity to quantify the potential impact of DM.

Another stumbling block for an organization is deciding to defer any data mining activity until a data warehouse is built. Our experience indicates that, oftentimes, DM could and should come first. The purpose of the data warehouse is to provide users the opportunity to study customer and market behavior both retrospectively and prospectively. A data mining pilot project can provide important insight into the fields and aggregates that need to be designed into the warehouse to make it really valuable. Further, the cost savings or revenue generation provided by DM can provide bootstrap funding for a data warehouse or related initiatives.

Recapping, in this article we addressed the key questions executives have about data mining - what it is, what the benefits are, and how to get started. Armed with this knowledge, begin with a pilot project. From there, you can continue building the data mining capability in your organization; to expand your business, improve profitability, reduce costs, and market your products more effectively.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Digging-Up-Dollars-With-Data-Mining---An-Executives-Guide&id=6052872

Data Mining As a Process

The data mining process is also known as knowledge discovery. It can be defined as the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and then summarizing the data into useful information in order to improve the revenue and cut the costs. The process enables categorization of data and the summary of the relationships is identified. When viewed in technical terms, the process can be defined as finding correlations or patterns in large relational databases. In this article, we look at how data mining works its innovations, the needed technological infrastructures and the tools such as phone validation.

Data mining is a relatively new term used in the data collection field. The process is very old but has evolved over the time. Companies have been able to use computers to shift over the large amounts of data for many years. The process has been used widely by the marketing firms in conducting market research. Through analysis, it is possible to define the regularity of customers shopping. How the items are bought. It is also possible to collect information needed for the establishment of revenue increase platform. Nowadays, what aides the process is the affordable and easy disk storage, computer processing power and applications developed.

Data extraction is commonly used by the companies that are after maintaining a stronger customer focus no matter where they are engaged. Most companies are engaged in retail, marketing, finance or communication. Through this process, it is possible to determine the different relationships between the varying factors. The varying factors include staffing, product positioning, pricing, social demographics, and market competition.

A data-mining program can be used. It is important note that the data mining applications vary in types. Some of the types include machine learning, statistical, and neural networks. The program is interested in any of the following four types of relationships: clusters (in this case the data is grouped in relation to the consumer preferences or logical relationships), classes (in this the data is stored and finds its use in the location of data in the per-determined groups), sequential patterns (in this case the data is used to estimate the behavioral patterns and patterns), and associations (data is used to identify associations).

In knowledge discovery, there are different levels of data analysis and they include genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks, nearest neighbor method, data visualization, decision trees, and rule induction. The level of analysis used depends on the data that is visualized and the output needed.

Nowadays, data extraction programs are readily available in different sizes from PC platforms, mainframe, and client/server. In the enterprise-wide uses, size ranges from the 10 GB to more than 11 TB. It is important to note that two crucial technological drivers are needed and are query complexity and, database size. When more data is needed to be processed and maintained, then a more powerful system is needed that can handle complex and greater queries.

With the emergence of professional data mining companies, the costs associated with process such as web data extraction, web scraping, web crawling and web data mining have greatly being made affordable.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-As-a-Process&id=7181033

All About PC Data Recovery

PC Data Recovery is the procedure of retrieving data from database or storage systems. You can recover data by using floppy discs, DVDs, hard drives, CDs, Memory cards etc. It helps you to recover all the corrupt or lost data in a professional, secure and fast manner. For all the businesses and IT companies, data recovery is important for saving data in an appropriate manner. The experts at the computer repair Sydney discuss some tips for it.

May be you are under a lot of mental stress and worried about how to retrieve the lost data as quickly as possible. The time for preventing your data from getting corrupt or lost has gone - the problem at hand is that of PC Data Recovery.

Firstly you could get hold of your tech savvy relatives or friends; if you are lucky enough, they will help you out and if in case you are really fortunate then they might even have data recovery software. However, if you are not lucky then you have to get your wallet out because data recovery is going to be an expensive affair. Also, just prepare yourself for a mundane and time-consuming act. Try to identify the problem with your hard disc. Either your computer fails to boot up or if it boots up, it does not show other drives. Listen carefully to your hard drive, if in case it makes some noises like that of ticking, scratching or scraping then you have to take it to the PC Data Recovery center where the experts solve your problem. As these services are time-consuming and expensive, you have to decide the worth of data that is stored in the hard disc:

If it is only a set of downloaded music or a few games then you should delete it and accept the data loss.

On the other hand, if it is some important information like a product or book that you have been working for years, then you have to take your system to a data recovery center for an evaluation- it generally costs nothing.

Therefore, if the hard drive is safe then you have a decent chance of retrieving data yourself. Firstly, you have to download some important software that will help in recovering data. Unfortunately, the reputed software are expensive, however, the good news is that many companies allow you to use them on a trial basis. Although there are some freeware versions but they are not easy to use. The execution of the further procedure depends on the set of hard drive:

    If your system has a single hard drive that is not partitioned then you have to attach hard drive to another system that has ample space to store all the lost data. This is technical so if in case you do not have any technical knowledge then get a computer savvy relative or friend to help you in PC Data Recovery.
    If in case, your computer system has a multiple drive set up and it boots up fine then all you have to do is to download the software to read the files.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?All-About-PC-Data-Recovery&id=3240328

Outsourcing Data Entry Services

Data entry services are among the many benefits that the IT sector is providing to corporate firms worldwide. These services often range from simple text data entry to alpha numerical entries requiring calculations such as bill processing for clients. To meet the demands for high quality and accurate textual and numerical data entry jobs, most outsourcing firms are employing the services of talented operators who are skilled in fast keyboard operations and word processing software.

Often business firms find it difficult to manage their huge data manipulation jobs and are compelled to outsource such jobs. In order to meet the deadlines in document entry jobs, the Business Processing Outsourcing (BPOs) units that are engaged in providing data entry services are offering their services in a fast, competitive and efficient manner. Quality in work is given top priority by these BPOs and to ensure this, they utilize the services of proofreaders who always double check the processed data for errors.

Data entry service providers also provide customized document entry services, suiting the requirements of client companies. Common data entry jobs being offered by BPOs include:

o Online data entry
o Offline data entry
o Data capture and conversion
o Document processing and management
o Medical document entry
o Insurance claim processing
o Census document entry

To cater to the increasing need of business firms to process their critical data as early as possible, most document processing firms have their own backup centers with sufficient employees. Most BPO firms operate round the clock to ensure that no work remains in pending state. The 24 hr operations of these firms also ensure that the daily requirements in critical data processing such as insurance claim processing are done in a timely manner.

Most BPOs, with the help of advanced IT equipments and professional trainers, can instantly train employees for mission critical data entry services and thus are capable of providing quality services for both short term as well as long term requirements of clients. The high quality training ensures that all their employees carry out the assigned jobs efficiently and accurately within the proposed time frame.

With the outsourcing of data entry services, most companies are able to concentrate on improving their core services and need only worry less about their daily clerical works. To add value to the services, excellent customer support is also provided by these document processing service providers. The quality document processing services provided by these firms help many corporate firms to stay competitive and profitable in the challenging business arena of today.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Outsourcing-Data-Entry-Services&id=1523730

Data Mining - Critical for Businesses to Tap the Unexplored Market

Knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) is an emerging field and is increasingly gaining importance in today's business. The knowledge discovery process, however, is vast, involving understanding of the business and its requirements, data selection, processing, mining and evaluation or interpretation; it does not have any pre-defined set of rules to go about solving a problem. Among the other stages, the data mining process holds high importance as the task involves identification of new patterns that have not been detected earlier from the dataset. This is relatively a broad concept involving web mining, text mining, online mining etc.

What Data Mining is and what it is not?

The data mining is the process of extracting information, which has been collected, analyzed and prepared, from the dataset and identifying new patterns from that information. At this juncture, it is also important to understand what it is not. The concept is often misunderstood for knowledge gathering, processing, analysis and interpretation/ inference derivation. While these processes are absolutely not data mining, they are very much necessary for its successful implementation.

The 'First-mover Advantage'

One of the major goals of the data mining process is to identify an unknown or rather unexplored segment that had always existed in the business or industry, but was overlooked. The process, when done meticulously using appropriate techniques, could even make way for niche segments providing companies the first-mover advantage. In any industry, the first-mover would bag the maximum benefits and exploit resources besides setting standards for other players to follow. The whole process is thus considered to be a worthy approach to identify unknown segments.

The online knowledge collection and research is the concept involving many complications and, therefore, outsourcing the data mining services often proves viable for large companies that cannot devote time for the task. Outsourcing the web mining services or text mining services would save an organization's productive time which would otherwise be spent in researching.

The data mining algorithms and challenges

Every data mining task follows certain algorithms using statistical methods, cluster analysis or decision tree techniques. However, there is no single universally accepted technique that can be adopted for all. Rather, the process completely depends on the nature of the business, industry and its requirements. Thus, appropriate methods have to be chosen depending upon the business operations.

The whole process is a subset of knowledge discovery process and as such involves different challenges. Analysis and preparation of dataset is very crucial as the well-researched material could assist in extracting only the relevant yet unidentified information useful for the business. Hence, the analysis of the gathered material and preparation of dataset, which also considers industrial standards during the process, would consume more time and labor. Investment is another major challenge in the process as it involves huge cost on deploying professionals with adequate domain knowledge plus knowledge on statistical and technological aspects.

The importance of maintaining a comprehensive database prompted the need for data mining which, in turn, paved way for niche concepts. Though the concept has been present for years now, companies faced with ever growing competition have realized its importance only in the recent years. Besides being relevant, the dataset from where the information is actually extracted also has to be sufficient enough so as to pull out and identify a new dimension. Yet, a standardized approach would result in better understanding and implementation of the newly identified patterns.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining---Critical-for-Businesses-to-Tap-the-Unexplored-Market&id=6745886

Data Entry Outsourcing

Data entry outsourcing is contracting with outside consultants, software houses or service bureaus to perform systems analysis, programming, and data center operations. In the U.S. in 2003, the term took on extra meaning, often referring to jobs being given to people in companies located in India and other countries. The main reason behind outsourcing is the availability of qualified and experienced computer operators at low cost.

Data entry outsourcing is limited to all types of data entry operations e.g. data conversion, document and image processing, catalog processing services, image enhancement, image editing and photo manipulation services, etc.

The need for data entry is constant for some organizations for making day to day decisions. In such cases data entry is a regular and continuous requirement. The types of companies for which this is the case are financial institutions, hospitals, lawyers, court houses, oil companies, transportation companies, Ivy League colleges, pharmaceutical companies, universities, publishing companies etc. For some other organizations data entry may be just a temporary requirement. Accurate and easily accessible data is a necessity for all.

Accumulated data is a powerful management resource. Since data entry outsourcing at lower cost is available, the latent potential of the information accumulated in data which was dumped earlier is being usefully exploited by the organization where data entry is just a temporary requirement.

The combination of digitization of media and the rush to outsource has resulted in a wide range of customers from the UK, USA, France, Norway and more than 20 other countries coming to India, China etc for data entry outsourcing.

Most of the time-consuming data entry jobs are being done by outsourcing. For example, catalog management, which involves handling and maintaining paper catalogs, is not just time consuming, but also expensive. By converting your product catalogs to online and digital catalogs, making changes, and updating your product catalog becomes as easy as the click of a button once data entry has been completed.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Outsourcing&id=222083

Web Harvesting Services For Some Constant To Better

Marketing consultancy, training and as a result of Coaching for individuals and from a variety of industries for years. I have come to recognize that people in one of two ways the process of building a business approach.For anyone what I identified as the farmers are either-Or harvesters. The problem is the process of building a business

Requires both cultivation and harvesting. Read more Decide who you are and how you ensure that you both Growing and harvesting new business. Great sales people are growers of the world. This people are not that mind can enjoy the castor three hours a day cold calling. Voluntary spending Days from the first floor of an office building and Visits each office on each floor to try and get one Appointment.

Harvesters will stop trading. Although they Have a green fruit on the tree, because their approach to people who are focused on Need and are willing and able to buy - so-Called low-hanging fruit. Harvesters to move the orchard and fruit garden that also carry the question Mature over time.

They demand new Gardens to the ripe fruit. Farmers rely on other elements of Advertising, direct mail, networking as promotional mix And PR activities for the company to develop. Farmers are preparing the soil, plant seeds, nurtures Plants, and to provide care for the fruit as it ripens. They grow your own garden, so they have a steady supply of ripe fruit.

However, sometimes farmers are so busy Gardens tend to forget to take the fruit, It’s either the harvesters when they leave their Daily rounds or rot on the tree. Obviously, in a perfect world, farmers and Harvesters to work together to ensure a constant supply Make sure you and ripe fruit is picked ripe fruit daily, or it spoils before a competitor does.

So In large companies, you get both a marketing Function and sales function.
However, the small two separate companies - do not have the luxury of different functions. Many small business owners is both cultivated and Crop of new companies as well as monitoring and enforcement for many other tasks required to keep a business Is.

Refers to the purchase decision process of moving Awareness, consciousness, awareness or love of preference for and ultimately to trust and buy. Promotional Activities such as advertising and direct mail are the most is effective in building awareness phase. Public Relations Activities and networks are the most powerful Preference and choice phases. Direct sales to Activity actually close the sale.

In his book, Sales Dogs Blair Singer "says marketing is more if you do the less effort you have to do with the sale. Opportunity to put their hands and are looking at you Instead of them, sniffing them. It is the art of Opportunities to come into force for what it is you "Says more effort is in your farm Garden, the less time you spend looking for the others in the orchards.

To challenge Farmers believe that they probably rely on They raised their hands. If a harvester how you can develop agriculture Skills? Implement activities that develop awareness for many potential customers in less time you allow then take you to each individual to achieve.


Source: http://fruit.ezinemark.com/web-harvesting-services-for-some-constant-to-better-7d32bdd3aa30.html

Beneficial Data Collection Services

Internet is becoming the biggest source for information gathering. Varieties of search engines are available over the World Wide Web which helps in searching any kind of information easily and quickly. Every business needs relevant data for their decision making for which market research plays a crucial role. One of the services booming very fast is the data collection services. This data mining service helps in gathering relevant data which is hugely needed for your business or personal use.

Traditionally, data collection has been done manually which is not very feasible in case of bulk data requirement. Although people still use manual copying and pasting of data from Web pages or download a complete Web site which is shear wastage of time and effort. Instead, a more reliable and convenient method is automated data collection technique. There is a web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of web pages for the specified topic and simultaneously incorporates this information into a database, XML file, CSV file, or other custom format for future reference. Few of the most commonly used web data extraction processes are websites which provide you information about the competitor's pricing and featured data; spider is a government portal that helps in extracting the names of citizens for an investigation; websites which have variety of downloadable images.

Aside, there is a more sophisticated method of automated data collection service. Here, you can easily scrape the web site information on daily basis automatically. This method greatly helps you in discovering the latest market trends, customer behavior and the future trends. Few of the major examples of automated data collection solutions are price monitoring information; collection of data of various financial institutions on a daily basis; verification of different reports on a constant basis and use them for taking better and progressive business decisions.

While using these service make sure you use the right procedure. Like when you are retrieving data download it in a spreadsheet so that the analysts can do the comparison and analysis properly. This will also help in getting accurate results in a faster and more refined manner.




Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Beneficial-Data-Collection-Services&id=5879822

Test Your Website Marketing Knowledge

Here are 5 questions to flex your mental muscle to. The answers and explanations are at the end - no cheating now!

RULES:

There are no trick questions. You cannot ask the audience but I welcome you to 'Phone a Friend' (and forward this article onto them!).

*Question 1:

"What happens if you submit your website to Google more than once?"

A. Nothing.

B. You are at risk of being penalised for multiple submissions

C. Your submission is bumped to the back of the queue

*Question 2:

"According to a survey conducted by AC Nielsen in December 2004 what did people state as their primary reason for doing their Christmas shopping online?"

A. Saves time

B. Better prices

C. Ability to find a more personalized gift

*Question 3:

"In Internet terms, what is a 'spider'?"

A. It's a virus that spreads using loopholes in certain web technologies

B. It's a software tool that search engines use to retrieve information from websites

C. It's another word for a person that browses websites

*Question 4:

"What is the industry average click through rate for banner advertisements? I.e. what percentage of all banner ads are actually clicked on?"

A. 0.39%

B. 1.39%

C. 2.39%

*Question 5:

"According to the latest research from the Computer Industry Almanac what was the worldwide online population in 2004? I.e. how many of the people, worldwide, accessed the Internet at some point in 2004?"

A. 934 million

B. 714 million

C. 579 million

**THE ANSWERS

Q.1 - "What happens if you submit your website to Google more than once?"

A. Nothing.

Google doesn't mind how many times you submit your website. However there are search engines out there that will penalise you for submitting too often. This is what Google says about submitting to its site:

"You are free to submit as often as you wish. However, given the nature of our inclusion process your time is better spent improving the content and links of your site."

Q.2 - "According to a survey conducted by AC Nielsen in December 2004 what did people state as their primary reason for doing their Christmas shopping online?"

A. Saves time

78% of the 1007 people surveyed gave 'Saves time' as their answer when asked their reasons for shopping online. The survey findings:

Reasons for Shopping Online:

Saves time 78%

Better prices 51%

More selection 43%

Easier shipping 40%

Ability to find a more personalized gift 28%

More information available about the products 20%

What this tells us is that people no longer view the Internet as a low-cost option. So perhaps you need to take a look at your own website and focus more on making the buying process as quick and simple as possible rather than trying to cut prices to attract buyers..

Q. 3 - "In Internet terms, what is a 'spider'?"

B. It's a software tool that search engines use to retrieve information from websites

When your website is submitted to a search engine the search engine sends out a 'spider' to visit your site and retrieve all the information from it. The spider then returns to the search engine with all the information that is then added to the search engine's database.

The results you see when you use a search engine are not live snapshots of websites. Instead, the results show the information that the spider collected the last time it visited each website. This is why it is sometimes possible to see a link that looks fine in the search engine results and then click on it to find it no longer exists.

This is because the search engine spider has yet to revisit this website and update the search engine's records.

Q.4 - "What is the industry average click through rate for banner advertisements? I.e. what percentage of all banner ads are actually clicked on?"

A. 0.39%

The latest studies indicate that only 0.39% of banners shown are actually clicked on. With powerful graphics and enticing offers this average clickthrough rate can be improved ten-fold or more. But the point remains that advertising by using banners alone no longer appears to be viable route unless, that is, the costs of using this method are exceptionally low.

Q.5 - "According to the latest research from the Computer Industry Almanac what was the worldwide online population in 2004? I.e. how many of the people, worldwide, accessed the Internet at some point in 2004?"

A. 934 million

It's predicted that this year the online population will hit 1 billion! Not all of these people will be your potential customers but no matter which way you look at - there has never been a better time to have a well-marketed website!

**SCORES - How Many Did You Get Right?

0 - 2: Don't forget - you learn more in this life from your mistakes than you do from anything else!

3 - 4: Well done! You obviously know your stuff or you're good at guessing!

5 out of 5: Outstanding! Top marks for you!

Michael Cheney is the Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM:
"High five Michael! Your bible is superb! The world needs to read it and learn from it." - Jay Conrad Levinson, Author of "Guerrilla Marketing"
http://www.websitemarketingbible.com

[You have my permission to use this article in your newsletter, on your website or anywhere else for that matter as long as it remains unedited and includes the resource box at the bottom.]

Website Marketer's Enemy No. 1

It's about an inch across by half an inch tall. It's quite innocuous and yet this silent killer reaps havoc every second of every day on your efforts to build your online empire.

What is it?

The DELETE key!

There comes a time in your efforts to market your website that you realise that it's no longer enough to tell your family and friends to visit your website - you need to get some people who will pay you in cash rather than compliments. You need to start approaching other website owners and start building an online network of contacts.

This is a crucial step to achieving online success. I once read a quote that applied at the time to conventional 'bricks and mortar' businesses but it just as pertinent if not more so for online businesses:

"You will not be successful by being a cave dweller."

Kind of obvious but there are so many business owners that are cave dwellers. Sitting in their offices staring at the phone day after day wondering why no new prospects ever phone them up. You have to stand up, open the door and get out into the world and shout from the rooftops about your business. If you're online you need to do the same for your website.

One of the best ways to do this is to establish reciprocal links with other relevant websites. But this is where Public Enemy No. 1 comes in - if you don't know how to bypass it all your efforts to contact the website owners and establish links with them will be in vain.

Those nasty spam monsters that roam the web harvesting email addresses from all web pages and then bombarding them with member enlargement hormones and get rich quick schemes have made it hard for you.

If you decide to try and email a website owner using the email address they make publicly available on their website you're already fighting an uphill battle. That email address is likely to be going through some form of spam filtering and if your email subject to this person has even a whiff of canned ham about it you'll be in that Trash Can quicker than you can say "$1million eBay secrets".

So, what's the answer?

Well, for starters - don't be tempted to use software to do your links work for you. People like people. Not robots. Do your own dirty work. Also - try and find the name of the website owner and use that in your email to them.

One of the best ways to overcome the dreaded Delete Key when you are contacting website owners though is to use their online contact form. When they receive an email via the form they have on their website they know that a real, living, actual human being has filled it in and not some spam monster - hence - they're more likely to read it.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Test-Your-Website-Marketing-Knowledge&id=16420

Web Scraping Tourism Reviews

I’m sure that many tourism business owners have spent a lot of time investigating review sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp, reading up on what their customers are saying. This is good business practice and tourism operators should always have an open ear to any praise or critique.

It is easy to look at reviews for one particular business, but what about at the regional or provincial level? What about comparing reviews across a destination? Which areas are reviewed the most and which are reviewed the least? Do users of Trip Advisor and Yelp leave a path of reviews as they travel or do only the best/worst experiences get mentioned? What is the percentage of positive vs. negative reviews? What is the overall quality of these reviews? These are just some of the questions that I’ve been thinking about recently.

Last fall I started a small research project that ‘scraped’ reviews from Trip Advisor for Nova Scotia. Web scraping is a somewhat controversial technique that actually uses software “agents” to harvest information from websites. In a basic sense, it is an automated version of copying specific information from a web site and pasting it into a spreadsheet. The tool I used to accomplish this is Mozenda. I ended up getting nearly 6,000 total reviews, including user, date, location, star rating /5, and comments. A very rich data source! I did some basic analysis by dividing the reviews up into three categories: accommodation, restaurants, and attractions, and the geolocating them at one of 77 different named destinations. I presented this preliminary material at the 2009 Travel and Tourism Research Association – Canada Chapter annual meeting in Guelph, Ontario. You can take a look at the Slideshare here:


Source: http://geoparticipation.ca/2010/04/30/web-scraping-tourism-reviews/

Web Data Extraction

The Internet as we know today is a repository of information that can be accessed across geographical societies. In just over two decades, the Web has moved from a university curiosity to a fundamental research, marketing and communications vehicle that impinges upon the everyday life of most people in all over the world. It is accessed by over 16% of the population of the world spanning over 233 countries.

As the amount of information on the Web grows, that information becomes ever harder to keep track of and use. Compounding the matter is this information is spread over billions of Web pages, each with its own independent structure and format. So how do you find the information you're looking for in a useful format - and do it quickly and easily without breaking the bank?

Search Isn't Enough

Search engines are a big help, but they can do only part of the work, and they are hard-pressed to keep up with daily changes. For all the power of Google and its kin, all that search engines can do is locate information and point to it. They go only two or three levels deep into a Web site to find information and then return URLs. Search Engines cannot retrieve information from deep-web, information that is available only after filling in some sort of registration form and logging, and store it in a desirable format. In order to save the information in a desirable format or a particular application, after using the search engine to locate data, you still have to do the following tasks to capture the information you need:

· Scan the content until you find the information.

· Mark the information (usually by highlighting with a mouse).

· Switch to another application (such as a spreadsheet, database or word processor).

· Paste the information into that application.

Its not all copy and paste

Consider the scenario of a company is looking to build up an email marketing list of over 100,000 thousand names and email addresses from a public group. It will take up over 28 man-hours if the person manages to copy and paste the Name and Email in 1 second, translating to over $500 in wages only, not to mention the other costs associated with it. Time involved in copying a record is directly proportion to the number of fields of data that has to copy/pasted.

Is there any Alternative to copy-paste?

A better solution, especially for companies that are aiming to exploit a broad swath of data about markets or competitors available on the Internet, lies with usage of custom Web harvesting software and tools.

Web harvesting software automatically extracts information from the Web and picks up where search engines leave off, doing the work the search engine can't. Extraction tools automate the reading, the copying and pasting necessary to collect information for further use. The software mimics the human interaction with the website and gathers data in a manner as if the website is being browsed. Web Harvesting software only navigate the website to locate, filter and copy the required data at much higher speeds that is humanly possible. Advanced software even able to browse the website and gather data silently without leaving the footprints of access.

The next article of this series will give more details about how such softwares and uncover some myths on web harvesting.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction&id=575212

An Epic TripAdvisor Update: Why Not Run on the Cloud? The Grand Experiment.

This is a guest post by Shawn Hsiao, Luke Massa, and Victor Luu. Shawn runs TripAdvisor’s Technical Operations team, Luke and Victor interned on his team this past summer. This post is introduced by Andy Gelfond, TripAdvisor’s head of engineering.

It's been a little over a year since our last post about the TripAdvisor architecture. It has been an exciting year. Our business and team continues to grow, we are now an independent public company, and we have continued to keep/scale our development process and culture as we have grown - we still run dozens of independent teams, and each team continues to work across the entire stack. All that has changed are the numbers:

    56M visitors per month
    350M+ pages requests a day
    120TB+ of warehouse data running on a large Hadoop cluster, and quickly growing

We also had a very successful college intern program that brought on over 60 interns this past summer, all who were quickly on boarded and doing the same kind of work as our full time engineers.

One recurring idea around here is why not run on the cloud? Two of our summer interns, Luke Massa and Victor Luu, took a serious look at this question by deploying a complete version of our site on Amazon Web Services. Here, in their own words, and a lot of technical detail, is their story of what they did this past summer.
Running TripAdvisor on AWS

This summer, at TripAdvisor we worked on an experimental project to evaluate running an entire production site in Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) environment. When we first started to experiment hosting www.tripadvisor.com and all international domains in the EC2 environment, the response from many of the members of our engineering organization was very simple: is it really worth paying Amazon when we already own our own hardware? And can it perform as well?

A few months later, as our great experiment in the cloud comes to a close, the answer is, of course, yes and no. We have learned a lot during this time, not only about the amazing benefits and severe pitfalls to AWS, but also how we might improve our architecture in our own, traditional colocation environment. And though we are not (yet?) prepared to flip over the DNS and send all traffic through AWS, its elasticity has proven to be an extremely useful and practical, learning tool!
Project Goals

    Build an entire site using EC2 and demonstrate that we can take production level traffic
    Build a cost model for such an operation
    Identify architectural changes that can help reduce cost and increase scalability
    Use this move to a new platform to find possible improvements in our current architecture

Architecture

Our goal was to build a fully functioning mirror of our live sites, capable of taking production level traffic. We called it “Project 700k”, because we were attempting to process 700k HTTP requests per minute with the same user experience as our live site. The user experience is to be measured by the request response time statistics. With a lot of fiddling and tweaking, we eventually came up with the following system architecture:

Virtual Private Cloud - All of our servers are hosted in a single VPC, or Virtual Private Cloud. This is Amazon’s way of providing a virtual network in a single geographical region (we happen to US East, Virginia, but theoretically we could spin up a whole new VPC in California, Ireland, etc.), all instances addressing each other with Private IPs.

Subnets - Within the VPC we have two subnets, each currently in the same availability zone for simplicity, but we plan to later spread them out for redundancy. The first subnet has its security settings to allow incoming and outgoing traffic from the internet, which we call the Public Subnet. The second one, the Private Subnet, only allows traffic from the public subnet. The Public Subnet houses a staging server which allows us to ssh into the private subnet, and a set of Load Balancers we’ll address later. All of our servers, memcache, and databases are located in the Private Subnet.

Front and Back end Servers - Front ends are responsible for accepting user requests, processing the requests, and then displaying the requested data to the user, presented with the correct HTML, CSS and javascript. The front ends use Java to handle most of this processing, and may query the memcache or the back ends for additional data. All front ends are created equal and should be carrying similar traffic assuming that the servers are load balanced correctly.

Back end instances are configured to host specific services, like media or vacation rentals. Because of this distribution, some servers are configured to do several smaller jobs, while others are configured to one large job. These servers may also make memcache or database calls to perform their jobs.

Load Balancers - To take full advantage of the elasticity, we use Amazon’s ELBs (Elastic Load Balancers) to manage the front end and back end servers. A front end belongs exclusively to a single pool, and so is listed under only one load balancer. However, a back end could perform several services and so is listed under several load balancers. For example, a back end may be responsible for the search, forums, and community services, and would then be part of those three load balancers. This works because each service communicates on a unique port. All of the front and back end servers are configured to send and receive requests from load balancers, rather than with other instances directly.

Staging Server - An additional staging instance, which we called stage01x, handles requests going into the VPC. It backs up the code base, collects timing and error logs, and allows for ssh into instances. Because stage01x needs to be in the public subnet, it receives an elastic IP from Amazon, which also serviced our public-facing load balancer to our AWS site hosted behind it at the early stages. stage01x also maintains a postgresql database of the servers’ hostnames and services. This serves a vital function in adding new instances and managing them throughout their lifetime, which we’ll discuss later.


Source: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/10/2/an-epic-tripadvisor-update-why-not-run-on-the-cloud-the-gran.html

Data Mining Services

You will get all solutions regarding data mining from many companies in India. You can consult a variety of companies for data mining services and considering the variety is beneficial to customers. These companies also offer web research services which will help companies to perform critical business activities.

Very competitive prices for commodities will be the results where there is competition among qualified players in the data mining, data collection services and other computer-based services. Every company willing to cut down their costs regarding outsourcing data mining services and BPO data mining services will benefit from the companies offering data mining services in India. In addition, web research services are being sourced from the companies.

Outsourcing is a great way to reduce costs regarding labor, and companies in India will benefit from companies in India as well as from outside the country. The most famous aspect of outsourcing is data entry. Preference of outsourcing services from offshore countries has been a practice by companies to reduce costs, and therefore, it is not a wonder getting outsource data mining to India.

For companies which are seeking for outsourcing services such as outsource web data extraction, it is good to consider a variety of companies. The comparison will help them get best quality of service and businesses will grow rapidly in regard to the opportunities provided by the outsourcing companies. Outsourcing does not only provide opportunities for companies to reduce costs but to get labor where countries are experiencing shortage.

Outsourcing presents good and fast communication opportunity to companies. People will be communicating at the most convenient time they have to get the job done. The company is able to gather dedicated resources and team to accomplish their purpose. Outsourcing is a good way of getting a good job because the company will look for the best workforce. In addition, the competition for the outsourcing provides a rich ground to get the best providers.

In order to retain the job, providers will need to perform very well. The company will be getting high quality services even in regard to the price they are offering. In fact, it is possible to get people to work on your projects. Companies are able to get work done with the shortest time possible. For instance, where there is a lot of work to be done, companies may post the projects onto the websites and the projects will get people to work on them. The time factor comes in where the company will not have to wait if it wants the projects completed immediately.

Outsourcing has been effective in cutting labor costs because companies will not have to pay the extra amount required to retain employees such as the allowances relating to travels, as well as housing and health. These responsibilities are met by the companies that employ people on a permanent basis. The opportunity presented by the outsourcing of data and services is comfort among many other things because these jobs can be completed at home. This is the reason why the jobs will be preferred more in the future.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-Services&id=4733707