Filed under: Analytics
As the software-as-a-service market continues to mature, there are companies emerging that are targeting specific sectors within the enterprise with solutions especially tailored and priced for them: the latest of these is InsightSquared, which has announced a Series A round of $4.5 million for its a business intelligence platform aimed specifically at small and medium-sized businesses.
The round was led by Atlas Venture, with participation also from NextView Ventures and new investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce.com. This brings total funding in the company since February 2011 to $5.5 million.
As part of the news, InsightSquared is also announcing that it is integrating with Salesforce for the latter company’s visualization services to be integrated into the service.
Other services included in InsightSquared fall firmly in the category of data analysis — typically the kind used by large enterprises and now becoming more affordable and accessible to smaller businesses, by way of the SaaS business model. They include activity tracking (dashboards to track activity from employees and clients in real-time, with trending options); sales forecasts; data quality monitoring (identifying, ranking and fixing data errors); ratios and KPIs; nightly emails; employee scorecards ranking each worker against his peers; tagging and filtering and integration with other data sources (eg voice tracking with M5 Networks); financial tracking and web tracking (with Google Analytics).
These services are offered in packages that begin at $99 per month, says the company.
On the heels of acquiring sales data analytics company Varicent last week, Big Blue is making another buy in the data space today— Vivisimo. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Vivisimo, which has raised $6 million in funding, launched as a spin-off from Carnegie Mellon and applies clustering technology to enterprise search. Vivisimo provides enterprises with search software that helps organizations access and analyze big data across the enterprise.
Vivisimo products are available for standalone search applications or as OEM versions embedded within partner applications and solutions. The software automates the discovery of data and helps employees navigate it with a single view across the enterprise.
In this presentation, Professor Peter Fader illustrates a remarkably simple but powerful model to predict future repeat purchasing patterns in a standard spreadsheet environment. The particular focus here is on non-profits trying to project donations, but it’s broadly applicable to many other B2B and B2C companies as well. Beyond the performance of the model, this talk also offers useful insights about data management and managerial diagnostics for model assessment.
Professor Fader also discusses the gap between academic research and industry use of marketing data. As the Co-Founder of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, he shares how this initiative uses an innovative crowdsourcing process to develop new statistical methods and apply them across a wide range of industries.
Filed under: Analytics, Datarati, Datarati.TV, Video, Web Analytics | Tags: Google Analytics, Video
http://online-behavior.com/googleanalytics/myths
In this presentation, delivered by Thomas Davenport at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit San Francisco 2011, we learn ways to manage analytics at an enterprise and how we can relate to decision-making in this environment.
Tom Davenport starts by discussing the different type of people involved in this process: Web Analysts, Business Intelligence, Conversion Optimizers, HR Analysts, and others. He also provides examples on which companies and professions are embracing analytics.
Following, we learn about a research he made where company executives were interviewed on how they make decisions and how they improve decision-making on their companies. From the techniques described, the ones that seem to stand out are the use Analytics for planning and learning from error.
More: http://online-behavior.com/emetrics/successful-business-analytics
Digital Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of digital data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing business performance.
Let’s estimate there are 20,000,000 Google Analytics accounts. Of those, let’s assume 60% of the accounts are active and 70% of the active accounts are small and mid size businesses. That leaves 8,400,000 companies. That’s a lot.
Taking a US focused view… According to Google only about 37% of American small businesses have a website. That means that there are 63% of small businesses don’t have a website. It’s probably safe to say they don’t know about web analytics either!
Let’s just agree that there are a LOT of people out there that don’t know what web analytics is or how to do it.
On the other hand, group number 1, the group that talks about Digital Analytics, is relatively small. Just look at the number of unique folks on twitter posting under the #measure hash tag.
We have a massive number of businesses that are doing Web Analytics while our core industry is focusing on Digital Analytics.
More: http://online-behavior.com/analytics/rethinking
Filed under: #mktgcloud, Analytics, Datarati, Marketing Automation, Metrics | Tags: Infographic, Measurement
Mu Sigma, a provider of analytics and data-driven decision support services for enterprise customers, has raised $108 million in funding in a round led by growth equity firm General Atlantic.
The financing comes about half a year after Mu Sigma raised $25 million from Sequoia Capital, which also participated in this round.
Headquartered in Chicago with most of its 1,500+ employees working out of Bangalore, India, Mu Sigma is a professional services firm that helps companies analyze ‘big data’to “institutionalize decision support”.
In a statement, Mu Sigma says it is already profitable and able to finance its operations on its own, but that it raised more venture capital to ‘accelerate growth’.
A portion of the new capital will be used to purchase shares held by existing shareholders, but the company did not disclose which shareholders and how much of the $108 million injection will be reserved for the buybacks.
Mu Sigma did say all current shareholders will retain stakes in the company.
More in this Wall Street Journal article.
Filed under: Actionable Insights, Ad Network, Analytics, Data, Datarati | Tags: Mixrank
Y Combinator-incubated MixRank has raised $1.5 million from 500 Startups, Mark Cuban, IAB founder Rich LeFurgy, MediaTrust chairman Peter Bordes, Leadclick founder Robert Afshar, Adify co-founder Larry Braitman, Chart.io cofounder David Beyer, Tom McInerney, Matt Ocko, and Zachary Bogue. The startup’s technology analyzes millions of ads every day to automatically identify the most effective ad copy and traffic sources in any market.
MixRank, which launched in July, is a competitive intelligence research tool for display advertising that uses machine learning algorithms and predictive modeling to automatically identify the most effective ads and traffic sources.
