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.

VITES™ is the ultimate online sales tool, offering sales focused reporting, visitor funneling, predictive purchasing and behavioural management. The very best sales and marketing learning can be handed to the website to pro-actively support your sales and marketing campaigns.

Marketing Reporting

By tracking where your visitors come from, how much they spend and how long they take to move through the sales process, you can get a unique insight into your e-sales cycle.

Each marketing campaign is given an ID and that ID is stamped on every visitor who comes to the site. If the visitor returns later via another campaign, the additional campaign ID is also recorded so you can see how many times you are paying for each visitor.

This ID is passed through the whole system, to your back-end CRM system and back (if you want) to your online advertiser so they can see which campaigns work and which don’t.

This is a level of transparency that is rarely, if ever, available in online advertising campaigns. And it comes as standard with VITES™.

Sales funnels

We all know that people take time to make decisions; they need persuading, and cajoling sometimes. What is better than knowing the actual stage that each visitor is at? You can plan your sales cycle and map it onto the website by creating a series of accurate sales profiles.

Within each profile you can have different content, imagery, calls to action and navigation. In fact, you can have a whole site custom designed just for the stage in the sale that the visitor is at. And this can change during the visit so that if the visitor moves onto the next stage, the site will adjust it’s content automatically to meet the challenges of that stage.

Talking to the right people at the right time never got easier, as you can add and remove calls to action at the various stages, dissuading (expensive) phone contact early on and encouraging the visitor to interact using the site itself and email. Later on in the process this could be reversed so the visitor has only one option left – talk to a person. Or the whole process could be in reverse. Your call.

Hows does that work then?

Each visitor is assigned a unique ID number which they carry with them throughout their online (and offline) journey. Against this ID VITES™ stores appropriate information such as which stage in the sales process they are at, their gender, their postcode and any one of a million or so different variables.

When they arrive at the site, or click on a navigation button, VITES™ intercepts the requests and decides what to show them based on what we already know about them. These are a carefully crafted set of rules that are configured into the VITES™ platform using a simple “if xx then yyy” format so it’s easy to understand, flexible to use and very scalable.

What about my sales team?

VITES™ is the ultimate sales tool. According to what rules are set, it will profile the visitor long before direct contact is required. And when you do need to interact with this person offline, the ID is passed to the CRM system so all the information is easily available, making the sales person’s life far easier and more efficient. Thus it is easier to prioritise enquiries and deal quickly with the urgent ones and invest time and effort in the high value ones.

Offline activity recorded on the CRM system can then be passed back up to the website using the unique ID code, and the website then re-synchronises with what has happened – if the offline conversation resulted in the potential client moving along the sales cycle then the site will know about it and the message, content and calls to action will all automatically reflect the progress made offline.

This unique ID can also be used with email so email campaigns can be better targeted and also drive returning visitors to the right sections of the site after an email drop.

VITES™ is a simple philosophy applied to a cross-channel marketing and sales strategy and can do pretty much anything once you understand that individual visitors can be recognised.

Have an idea about how you could use this? Or just want to know more? Why not contact us?

The dynamic web understands better what the visitor wants and provides a vastly improved experience, an experience that is largely personalised to the visitor and one that better matches the needs of both the web-site owner and his or her visitor.

The silent salesperson

With flat web sites having to meet the needs of anyone who might stop by, the key sales messages that you would want to get across to certain groups cannot be given their appropriate space. With VITES™ you can identify the target groups and tailor the message, the content and the path though the site. It’s like having a silent salesman watching every visitor and gently guiding them down the most appropriate path.

Web statistics are poor

The current crop of session and page reporting systems are very complex, very powerful reporting systems. Some can even make sense of real people and try to give you statistics and value rating. But the learning you get from them can be time consuming to understand, possibly misleading and ultimately only tends to explain why something happened in the past.

You have to translate these “findings” into recommendations and then implement them on your (different) web platform. Also these changes can, in their own right, ruin any reporting you might have. A better solution, surely, is to segment all the visitors into groups, report on them and then tailor their path so it improves the value to your business.

Radical?

Not in the slightest. Behavioural techniques have been used in selling since the middle ages – in fact almost all selling has behavioural understanding at it’s core and the best selling is done face to face or one-on-one. VITES™ gives you the opportunity to perform that one-on-one selling role in the world of new media.

Amazon does it, Ebay does it and Google does it a little more subtly so it’s pretty commonplace. But because it happens “behind the scenes” you do not see it as a visitor. These are all very large in-house developed solutions; for the first time VITES™ offers you a commercial product available off the shelf and which is straightforward to implement.

Overview

Break your visitors into groups of any size (1-1,000,000) and serve them their own version of the web-experience, now and every time they visit. Personalised calls-to-action (CTA), web 2.0 functions, layout, navigation, content and design. Automatically move your visitors from group to group using simple rules. Restrict what the groups see and can do. Communicate via email, ICQ, dmail & social networking according to the needs of their group.

End of the “one-size fits-all” web?

The “one-size fits all” web is a compromise, a general-purpose attempt to deal with all the potential combinations of types of visitors. By way of example, the benefits of creating creating custom landing pages by simple keyword groups is widely documented as hugely improving online conversion rates. Despite this, even the most savvy organisations don’t carry this any further than the first landing page and certainly look to learn from this when the visitor returns to the site. This represents a huge loss in conversion rates.

Compounding this loss is the increase in visitor expectation. No two people have the same needs and need to be dealt with in an intelligent manner or they well simply go somewhere else.

Web III? (sic)

Personalised, adaptive and tailored content goes a long way to answer the need of this new breed of customers and the results speak for themselves. For most organisations this means that they can successfully dominate their Internet marketplace with a reduced cost of marketing and increased visitor value.

An organisation showing a 20% reduction in cost per enquiry could use the marketing spend to fund the driving of an additional 30% of revenue, this is a powerful reason to chase the goal. This is not chump change, this is a seriously attractive and compelling goal.

Web plus (sic)

Interactions don’t just exist in a single online space anymore, other mediums are frequently used to talk and drive the site visitors (call centres, direct mail, physical meetings, email, ICQ, social networking, off-site interaction). These are all source of intelligence and information [and covered in-depth here] and can be used to either feed to personalisation engine or be fed by the engine. The relationship is bi-directional and so it should.

The sky’s the limit

When considering tailored or personalised content there is really no end to it’s uses; it really is a marketers dream tool. Any item of information available anywhere can influence what a visitor is shown. Some examples of the triggers for content change are shown below:

• Macro environment. Time of day, day of week, season, weather, public holiday, event, share price of BP, lead news story.
• Visitor environment. Geo location, browser, operating system, ISP, IP address, iphone.
• Visitor history. Last visit, first visit, frequency, pattern, number, relationship period.
• Visitor engagement level. Place in sales cycle, previous actions completed, next planned actions, off-site interactions, email interactions, telephone, face-to-face
• Source. Ad type, keywords used, product/service interest, ad network, demographics learning
• Demographics. ACORN type, income, peer-group learning

What’s next?

If you want to learn more about how you can utilise this element of the VITES™ platform then contact Liam, Nick or Martin or you can learn more about the other 4 key functions and benefits of VITES™.

The art of improvement is simple; make a change and then test it. If it’s better then use the latest version as the best and then cycle round again. The compounding effect of making lots of small improvements gives a number of key benefits:

• Continual improvement drives the performance up, relentlessly
• A frequent change culture encourages the testing of lots of ideas, sometimes the daftest or smallest of ideas have a major impact on performance
• Reduction of risk, a poorer performing idea is quickly and efficiently scrapped
• Much wider pool of thinking, more ideas from more people adheres closely to the concept of “the wisdom of the masses”
• Avoids the “Highest paid persons opinion” (HiPPO) quandary where decisions are made at the wrong level by the wrong people
• Compounding small improvement generates a huge improvement over time
• Real learning is possible and this helps the feedback loop for the next test
• No idea is right or wrong – it simply generates learning

The downside of kaizen in the digital world is that most web-site environments are simply not built to allow the kind of rapid change, test function that is required to get the most from this approach. VITES™ at it’s core is built around this philosophy.

Trial and error culture

Connected adopt a Kaizen approach to ongoing development and conversion rates where staying agile and making lots and lots of small changes – each time testing them to measure success – and then moving on again. Connected offer a number of services to help make this happen:-

• Fixed Kaizen contracts. A fixed number of tests or hours in a given period with a planned target to reach.
• A/B testing suites. Utilising the VITES™ platform to provide accurate, reliable A/B testing.
• Profile/persona-based testing. VITES™ supports unlimited profiles and profiles types, each can be tested independently or raced against a “banker”.
• Micro-site build & development. Avoiding the need to completely re-develop a client web-site and provide much of the improvement via a micro or landing-page site.
• Business Intelligence reporting. VITES™ Passport ™ provides a huge mine of data that can be accessed to provide unique learning. Provided as a service or as an API.
• Landing-page heavy lifting projects. The key first-wins for most commercial traffic sites, provided as a service, turnkey or consultancy.
• Performance contracts. Fixed target-based contract rewarded around specific goals and milestones.

Connected provide these services either standalone or linked with existing build-and-manage contracts.

What results can you expect?

Depending on the start point most clients can expect to achieve a doubling of conversion rates during the first year. The law of diminishing returns can apply and often the major advances are made in the early part of the project. Pushing down the “long tail” still has great value and the ongoing refining of the solution frequently uncovers surprises and big jumps on online conversion rates.

Keen to find out more?

Thinking of entering this world? Talk to Liam, Nick or Martin on 0845 051 4228 and he’ll sit down with you and go through the various options available and how to best approach improving your digital offering.

Never wishing to stand-still and knowing that VITES™ currently offers a 2 or 3 year lead in thinking and technology, Connected are striving for even more greatness. In 2009, Connected openly published the 2 year development plan for VITES™ showing a strong commitment to ongoing R&D with a £250k budget and further resources in the form of management, quality control and deployment/release tools.

Quality

2010 is the year of quality for Connected – a number of specific initiatives headed by John Hyde in Q3 2009 will spearhead this drive in 2010 to ensure our clients get the very best service and a VITES™ product they want and can use. Listening intently to the needs of the clients is a cornerstone of our development planning and Connected continue to listen to the needs of it’s clients.

Open Source VITES™?

Yes and yes! Targeted for limited Open Source release in 2010 is a number of the core applications found in VITES™. This will be a limited release to early adopters who show they have the in-house technical, UI and testing skills and Connected are inviting applications to join the Alpha programme.

People

The technical team was substantially strengthened in 2009 with the addition of Charlotte, Aaron and Doug and 2010 will see another 3 technical people joining bringing the team up to a total of 12 people.

Account support has also seen similar growth in 2009 with another 2 slots planned in late 2010. This is raising our account support game and allowing the clients better access to ideas, technology and resources.

Sales & marketing

The current client profile is largely unchanged over the last couple of years and the relatively high entry to market remains the same. Connected are looking to broaden the appeal of VITES™ to both smaller and larger organisations and to do this is developing a lower entry cost and a more flexible deployment model. Watch out for developments in the this area, 2010 is an exciting year.

• 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.

A CRM interface is provided allowing easy flow of information in and out of the Passport database ensuring the information contained is up to date and accurate.

The database schema is optimised for speed of read and writes in the highly critical live VITES environment and at the last count approximately 100gb of Passport data is available online to form the basis of business decision, email activity, behavioural management and personalised content.

We are all different. No two groups of people have the same aims, thinking, attention span, decision process, fears or barriers to interaction. On-the-ball organisations are starting to realise a new approach and methodology is required in order to better manage visitors and to out-think their competitors.

The “one size-fits all” web that we see today has worked pretty well for the first 10 years of the web. It is, however, a rather poor fit for most business models with it’s rigid structure, resource intensive deployment and general-purpose operation.

Long gone are the days of simply creating a web assets and leaving them untouched, the drive for continual and relentless improvement now haunts most web and marketing departments. The current crop of 1990’s tools and old-world marketing thinking is proving to be a very expensive and flawed route for many organisations.

The role of web-site traffic in generating a successful site is starting to change, organisations now plan “multi-touch” campaigns across a wide range of complimentary media using a range of methodologies. Consolidating this understanding into a single, client-centric, view of traffic that is integrated into the heart of client systems and decision-making processes has become critical to success to competitive marketplaces. Say good-bye to collating reporting from page-based analytics, old-fashioned traffic and conversion reports : Say hello to integrated business intelligence. A new dawn? You betcha

A unified platform

The idea was to create a platform that allowed organisations to optimise their operational functions, brand messaging and information flow in such as way as to create a substantial competitive advantage. Whilst all of these features can be found in different platforms you quickly realise the benefit of integrating all of the key elements into a single, easy-to-use, platform.

This turned out to be a pretty big job, from a seed of an idea in 2002 the early prototypes released in 2004/5 showed promise but were hampered by relatively high deployment costs, limited performance and high R&D costs. In 2006 the the decision was made to re-write the platform from scratch using the learning from the previous years. A new roadmap was created and approximately £250k was invested in the development of V2.0 which turned out to be far easier to deploy, much higher performance and added crucial new features such as proper A/B testing and great API support.

Now on version 2.4 (released June 2009) Connected have re-defined the next generation; a flexible and powerful web platform available commercially to all. The platform provides a simple system to provide tailored, adaptive & personalised content; A/B and multivariate testing; platform independent inbound/outbound traffic management and integrated business inteliigence.

Key features & benefits

Personalised delivery : Right message, right time

Benefits: Visitors will stay longer, engage better, convert better, convert cheaper, convert faster and spend more money

Features: Break your visitors into groups of any size (1-1,000,000) and serve them their own version of the web-experience, now and every time they visit. Personalised calls-to-action (CTA), web 2.0 functions, layout, navigation, content and design. Automatically move your visitors from group to group using simple rules. Restrict what the groups see and can do. Communicate via email, ICQ, dmail & social networking according to the needs of their group.

A/B Testing : Continual experimentation and improvement

Benefits: Reverse falling conversion rates, reduce your traffic budget, be sure about successes, applied learning is cheaper next time round, beat your competitors, stay ahead of the game

Features: Simple, fast and accurate testing of the effectiveness of pages, functions, copy, Calls-to-Action, layout, design, brand messaging and profiles. Automated 2, 3 or 4-way testing with statistically correct reporting. Encourages the test, test and test again philosophy of continual improvement.

Whole of life visitor management : Business intelligence and simplified brand messaging

Benefits: Accurate information = good decisions, cut wastage, better customer communications, agility in messaging and brand communication.

Features: Supports over 50,000 landing pages with uniquely tracked codes for simple RoI reporting. Visitor value measured across single session, multiple session, multiple session/computer and whole of life. Full duplex API to back-end CRM systems allowing any piece of data or function to be synchronised online, near line or off-line in call-centres, fulfillment centres, logistics and customer services. Move data using XML, FTP, SQL and email. API to fire actions to third-party systems for data capture, processing enquiries and on-line booking systems.

Advertising RoI tracking : Simple management of traffic sources

Benefits: Race different agencies and media companies to get the best bang for your buck, simple overviews allow for quick and accurate decisions, no need to trust/question/review your media partners

Features: Fully featured APIs for Google, AOL/Advertising.com/Platform A, Yahoo!, Blue Lithium. End-to-end, click to sale reporting. Supports multi-network touch points, variable post-impression. Provides matching and synchronisation for real cost per acquisition and cost per sale. [find out more]

VITES is currently available under a license & support contract starting from £195 per month based on traffic volume and also as a complete turnkey service.