ChoiceStream Brings Recommendations to Online Advertising
In this latest installment in our series on recommendation engines, we look at ChoiceStream - a recommendations vendor which counts Overstock, Borders and AT&T among its high profile clients. ChoiceStream has recently turned its attention to using recommendations in online advertising, and in this post we look at how the company is doing this. The ChoiceStream advertising product aims to generate personalized banner ads for each consumer, using data on shopping and buying patterns that it collects from the advertiser's website. The company claims that this technology improves click-thru rates, conversion rates and average order size.
In a briefing, the company showed us how its recommendations are influencing ads on AT&T's website, based on what an individual user browses at Overstock.
There would obviously be an affinity with Overstock already for the user, if they had visited Overstock (or similar sites also using ChoiceStream's platform) before and then saw an ad for Overstock on AT&T. Nevertheless, despite this bias it makes sense that conversions would increase if the Overstock ad that a user sees on AT&T's website is personalized based on that user's past shopping or browsing behavior. The company claimed that for this particular campaign, user click-thru rates doubled, conversion "about doubled" and Overstock orders increased by an average of 20-30%. If accurate, then those are compelling figures for Overstock.
It remains to be seen whether this technology can be used generally. Right now it appears to have a relatively limited niche in the retail market and its success is very dependent on users having visited and used participating sites (such as Overstock) before.
Facebook
Sponsored by
-
French Government Chooses Mozilla To Replace IBM and Microsoft For 130,000 Desktop PC's
October 30, 2009 / 11 Comments -
Email + CRM + LinkedIn + Twitter = Hustler's Power Drill
October 28, 2009 / 21 Comments -
Is the Relational Database Doomed?
February 12, 2009 / 111 Comments -
Proton Media: The Most Advanced Collaboration Technology in the Market?
October 30, 2009 / 11 Comments -
Netvibes Goes From Web 2.0 To Enterprise 2.0 In Partnership With Sage Software
November 3, 2009 / 5 Comments
-
Can $890,000 Make MediaWiki Useful?
June 12, 2009 / 10 Comments -
Proton Media: The Most Advanced Collaboration Technology in the Market?
October 30, 2009 / 11 Comments -
Yammer Goes Deep: 50,000 Networks Up and Running
November 3, 2009 / 3 Comments -
Enterprise 2.0: Declaring War Does Not Work
November 3, 2009 / 4 Comments -
CubeTree: Drilling Comments Down to the Cell in a Spreadsheet
November 4, 2009 / 2 Comments
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteEnterprise posts
Hello Richard,
Great series of article. You've pretty much covered all the social media, music/video and ecommerce recommandation landscape !!
I am currently doing some research on recommendation engines for collaborative tagging ... Have you planned on posting on that subject as well ? I have read some interesting thoughts in the comments on that, and a lot of your analysis also apply to this, but the objectives and constraints are somewhat different ;-)
Looking forward to your feedback, happy to share mine in the next week or so,
Kind regards,
Amaury
Great series of articles, Richard. It’s nice to have a light shown on the work that we and others in our industry are doing. Like you, we see personalized recommendations as a transforming technology and one that has not yet reached its full potential. Check out our blog for more on where we see the industry headed.
Mike Strickman of ChoiceStream
While there may be some doom and gloom at the moment with online advertising budgets there is still going to be massive growth in the area in the coming years.
Online Digital Trackable Advertising is a major trend in the market place and at 8% saturation means it is approaching the strong growth in the S-Curve. It is predicted that it takes 50% of the time to reach 10% and the other 50% of the time to reach 90%. So far, roughly 10 years have passed with online advertising and that means that by 2020 we should be at or close to 90% of all advertising budgets using some or all online advertising for marketing.
There are many smaller players in the market that have not surfaced yet that are experiencing major growth such as http://www.FreeKii.com and as these grow and share the market for online advertising it skews the growth rate since they may not be included in top players for growth calculation.
The actual rate of growth in the next few years will be incredible and will make the last 10 years look pale in comparison. Remember the auto industry 100 years ago?
Gorilla marketing in today's economy is everything, marketing to get through the recession!
If your interested in web optimization for your site, there is a free site for uploading video ads for your business, they also have image uploads if you are not yet up to videos. The more sites you can link to the greater your market will be. They have a free link exchange as well.
http://adwido.com