We pioneered using generic online booking systems back in 2004 and went on to build one of the most sophisticated and flexible booking systems commercially available today. Our OBS.vites module will bolt into any existing web-site or sit standalone as a booking microsite.

Licensed on a volume level, prices start from just £250 pm plus installation, deployment and integration costs. Thinking of implementing a proper online booking system? Time to speak to Liam, Nick, Andy or Martin and discuss your needs.

These are all questions typically running around marketing departments at the moment and the stock answer is to “get a new one designed” on the basis that it must be better than the old one as it’s newer and we’ve learned things (have we?) about the current versions of the landing pages.

Trial and error economics

Don’t guess, don’t risk the return on the heavy-lifters. Your current series of pages act as a ‘banker’ – put simply the new stuff has to race the best of the best you have already. When testing the new pages against the current bankers use a reliable testing method (such as the null hypothesis) that gives results you can be confident in. If you can be confident in the results then you can queue up hundreds of ideas to be tested and leave the testing harness to do the hard work or evaluating the changes.

The risk is low because:

• Pages that perform a lot worse than the banker will show up as failing very quickly and can be removed from the test quickly.
• Pages that perform a lot better than the banker will show up as succeeding very quickly and can replace the banker quickly.
• Pages that perform similarly will take a lot longer to determine their value but as they are not hurting (or helping) the conversion rate there is no loss associated with leaving them in test except the loss of the opportunity to run another test.
• Testing small changes can help with specific learning. For example, the data-entry form might perform better with a solid blue background versus white. This is real learning and can be applied (after testing) across other landing pages.

In fact, taken as a continuous process (Kaizen) optimising the landing pages can be the easiest and fastest way to continually improve a site, although not very glamorous for a marketing department.

About VITES™ as a testing tool

Split testing using the null hypothesis is built-into the core of VITES™ and offers a fast, reliable and repeatable test harness. Testing can be done via profile, traffic type, campaign or any other superset of visitor data (postcode range, for example) and is not limited to A/B testing with support for 26 concurrent tests running in each profile.  Traffic can be split in any range, typically the fastest results are achieved using a 50:50 ratio in an A/B test but 80:20 tests are commonly used when clients are nervous about radical changes to high net-worth landing pages.

The results were stunning (for 2001) and showed that 80% of the advertising spend was pretty poor indeed. Not surprisingly our client was over the moon with this new-found transparency and their business exploded when they invested in the right online advertising and had faith in the value of it. It was a real way to measure the actual return on advertising investment.

VITES™ 1.0

Born in the middle of 2003, this was the first time page content was linked to data recorded. It was clear that first time visitors to a website needed to be encouraged to return to generate revenue, and that returning visitors to the website needed to be treated differently to first timers. So a simple “tunneling system” was implemented that established where the visitor was in the sales cycle by understanding their previous activity on the website and also by interrogating the offline CRM system.

By doing this, VITES™ dropped people into the most appropriate tunnel and fed them tunnel specific content, imagery and, most importantly, applications.

Conversion rates rocketed. We had stumbled across a killer application for the web. In much the same way as Sergey Brin devised a method at Stanford University to “rank” sites in importance based on inbound links – which then became the basis for Google – we stumbled upon the link between recording and behaviour and predictive purchasing or behavioural targeting was born.

VITES™ 1.5

The original version was a killer. It doubled conversion rates overnight but it was very cumbersome to build sites around it and the clunky tunnels were flawed when it came to bookmarking and search engine maps. This needed addressing so a specification to improve the whole system was hastily put together in 2004 to meet these shortcomings.

This was a simpler beast to operate, more flexible, more powerful but still required hand cutting of the tunnels. We had tunnel vision!

VITES™ 2.x

A huge step in development was identified in late 2005 and the move to visitor profiles is set in stone. The whole system needed to be rewritten and was completed by the middle of 2006. This included a number of innovations including profiles, rules and confidence ratings (how confident the system is that a person fits a profile).

The latest platform is developed was the established LAMP platform and the task of rolling it out to the first handful of clients started.

The tool

Soon after VITES™ 2.x was launched it was realised that customers were coming up with great ways in which to use this tool. It became a very natural and easy tool to customise web content so sites could change at the weekend or overnight or when the call centre was busy or any other internal or external event.

Market leading online advertising companies became exposed to the technology and started sharing their data with VITES™ allowing it to make better decisions. We’ve only just scratched the surface with the VITES™ tool – there are a hundred or even a thousand more uses for it that we are yet to find.

• Web-site specification and build
• Dynamic and personalised delivery (via VITES™)
• Data interfaces to CRM and other third-party systems
• Compliance testing
• A/B testing
• Customer journey management
• Bespoke application build
• Widget development
• Social networking platform development
• High-availability server management
• Holistic and event-based alerting systems

Projects include Ultralase, Age Partnership, Q8 Oils, Barratts Shoes, Hardys Wines, Safestyle Windows, Skn Clinics, MINI, HBOS, Gray Nicolls, Sash Windows and Manchester Airport.

The applications themselves will do nothing of the sort, they need to be used by people who know a) what the data represents and b) how to bring that knowledge to bear in an organisation’s structure. The only experts are the people who have been taught how to use the applications and, to be frank, even the most complex of the analytics systems only take a few weeks to master.

*anyone remember “hit counters” from the late 1990’s? How many bad decisions came from those little beauties?

Reasons to be cautious

The fast growth of the analytics field over the last few years shows how the market is shifting from simple PPC/CPC strategies to more complex, decision-based, thinking as companies attempt to seek competitive advantage in just a few tiny areas (Google Adwords, for example).

There is undoubtedly benefits to be found using basic analytics tools mixed in with a dose of common sense but we have to avoid defining the whole business strategy around just one element of the process (acquisitions).

Good business practice is often struggling in hand-to-hand combat with marketing departments that have recently acquired (via PPC and basic analytics) the “keys to the door”. There is always a bigger picture. In some cases the analytical data, and it’s interpretation, is so flawed as to be a liability to the medium-term survival of the business. Is this risky? You bet it is.

But it’s also an opportunity. Whilst organisations are fighting over the last 0.1% of new visitor acquisitions (and paying a heavier and heavier penalty to do this) it becomes patently clear that they are overlooking huge great areas in which improvements to the business could yield faster, easier, cheaper and more unique improvements.

You just need to stand back and look at the whole vista. If you are missing any pieces of the jigsaw then corporate amnesia can occurs when one part of the organisation makes a decision which very clearly did not account for other key data sitting elsewhere in the enterprise.

Most organisations should, but do not, run any kind of knowledge management so not only are mistakes repeated but good practice is continually replaced with bad practice in a kind of suicide cycle of ever decreasing returns. It’s pretty painful to watch and requires a dramatic philosophy change to remove the source of the addiction.

What’s missing?

Climbing a mountain might have to be done one step at a time, starting from the bottom. Building a successful internet strategy is a whole lot easier. We can jump around trying new stuff going up and down the mountain as we please – as long as we know the journey has a point and purpose. This is the strategy.

If you take a close look at the online world you will see it is jerked around back-and-forth chasing some perceived nirvana – burning valuable resources that could be better deployed building new strategies and communicating great vision. Why?

The gulf between interpreting really useful data and a solid understanding of the business and organisational aims of the participants is dramatic. This is where traditional “Management Information” systems are supposed to sit, supporting business-level decisions with accurate, complete vision, information. This is a little harder on the web for a number of reasons:

1. An exponentially larger range of information is gathered in the online world, too much for classic MI systems
2. The information changes so fast, so much more information is available every day that decision criteria date too quickly
3. Easy use of pure metrics (£1 in, £5 out) is so appealing at the front-end of the funnel that the real business strategy needs take a backseat to tactical day-to-day operational needs.

What’s then needed is a single system that can interpret the vast amounts of raw data collected at the front-end moderated with the softer business nuances of the customer journey, whole-of-life value, net profit and organisational good-will. What’s also needed is a clear understanding of the value that individual customers bring and how to harness this value in the most cost effective manner.

These systems are coming, most are bespoke for the moment, and will replace basic analytics.

About VITES BIG.TOE

Currently in Alpha and due for full Beta launch in Q3 2010. (B)usiness (I)nformation (G)roup – (T)heory (o)f (E)verything is a collection of modules that plug-into Connected’s VITES platform to provide end-to-end management information across the whole of a customer journey including cost of acquisition, enquiry, sale and retention as well as providing profit information and granular sales cycle information.

BIG.TOE is a major development plan and a supported programme is available under limited release to clients. If you are interested then please contact Martin Dower, CEO.