Platform helps brands connect collected data to targeting options

Kristina: How can MetraTech help online businesses?

Scott Swartz, CEO and Founder, MetraTech: Online businesses today are all about consumptive service commerce. As we move to that new model, however, businesses need tools to help them model, build, and monetize effectively. We provide that engine to power today's commerce.

Kristina: Most businesses understand basic behavioral targeting. How does targeting based on data within an organization's billing system improve the chance of engagement and conversion?

Scott: Behavioral targeting leverages user-driven, unstructured data, but this is sub-transactional data. It's only when you take the sub-transactional data and couple that with transactional data that it tells a complete story about the user and his or her engagement. Additionally, when you combine transactional and sub-transactional data, it can help you to provide predictive modeling regarding future revenue for your customer base, as well as your business.

Kristina: What kinds of data should the business focus on?

Scott: Recently, the Aberdeen Group looked at the most important data sources for business, and they identified the top five: transactional or structured data, social media and sentiment data, clickstream usage, digital media and machine-to-machine (M2M) or sensor-driven data. I agree in that the structured data sets the foundation for the relationship with the user, and then the other data sources add color to unpack customer rationale and current and future intent.

Kristina: Ecommerce is already over $40b for the year - how important is it for organizations to look into new ways to understand their customers and target new products/services?

Scott: Understanding the customer and targeting new products and services is so important to today's companies; their business futures are at stake. Growth and survival in the ecommerce space will center on those businesses that respond in real time to the user - not in 30 minutes, but the moment the user interacts with an application or service. Companies need new ways to learn the behavioral patterns of their customer base and to respond dynamically with in-app and upsell offers that drive maximum revenue. Additionally, companies must be able to change prices based on demand - without human intervention - so that yield management becomes a business staple.

Tags: data collection, data usage, MetraTech, online data