magnify360 Blog

Ever wonder why the rearview mirror on the passenger side of your car is distorted?

As the driver, your eye is further away from it. In order for you to still see the images, the mirror is given a convex shape, which shrinks the reflection. The images are there, but they’re not exactly accurate. 

The same can be said for behavioral targeting and web site optimization. With traditional multivariate testing, you can look back on results to see what made your traffic convert, but the data has been distorted with a little thing called time. 

The investment community puts it succinctly: past performance is no guarantee of future results. I like to say, “The right experience for yesterday isn’t necessarily the right experience for right now.” 

Your customer base is constantly changing. Just because a certain landing page performed the best last month or even last week doesn’t mean it’s going to be relevant to your existing flow of visitors.

Take social media, for example. It’s extremely dynamic, with a high volatility over winning pages. This begs the question: how can an online marketer effectively adapt to these constant changes?

Again, we come back to time. REAL time. To ensure the best performing page is always being served, you must be able to evaluate an individual in the moment, and predict what’s most relevant to them.

It all goes back to the driver’s seat. Ask yourself: are you staring at the rearview, looking back at past results? Or are you facing forward, shifting gears and preparing for the curves ahead…

 

What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger. ~T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

We change. Constantly. Every experience, big or small, alters who we are, and our frame of mind in any given situation. So as marketers, how do we effectively understand such a moving target? Demographics can offer up objective facts - person X lives in the midwest and recently bought a truck - but the bigger question remains elusive and unanswered - WHY did they buy it? What was their headspace in that precise moment that led them to the purchase? 

Let’s look at another example. It’s late in the afternoon and a young businesswoman, needing a distraction after a long meeting, decides to peruse the sales section of her favorite online retailer. She doesn’t get paid for another week, so she doesn’t intend to buy anything right now, but picturing herself in that new sundress puts her in a good mood.

When she gets home that evening, she’s pleasantly surprised by a substantial tax refund, and immediately thinks of the dress. She goes back to the retailer, selects the dress, and with the unexpected money burning a hole in her pocket, adds shoes and a matching handbag to her shopping cart. 

These behavioral changes are subtle, yet powerful. Many solutions attempt to test behavioral attributes in an effort to better understand intent, but as you can see from the example above, unless the data is captured in real-time, it’s already outdated. This is where magnify360 steps in.

Our Predictive DNA technology is able to analyze attitudes, motivations, personality characteristics and belief systems in the moment, at the micro level. It gets in the headspace of every single visitor,  identifies their psychographic DNA, if you will, to present them with a truly unique browsing experience.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Predictive DNA serves as a closed-loop research engine. It’s smart technology that learns from a person’s on site behavior; adapting content, page layout and flow to offer up only the most optimized experience for who the person is in the moment.

Just like you. Over the course of reading this, your mood may have shifted, you may be getting hungry, your phone might be ringing, you’re about to face heavy traffic… People change. 

In ending, Ancient Greek Philosopher Heraclitus said it best. “No man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

 

I recently spoke with Damian Joseph from BusinessWeek’s Innovation & Design team about the ways in which Web sites have (or haven’t) evolved, and how letting your visitors design your site can transform it into a revenue generating machine.

Check out the full story on the NEXT blog: http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2009/02/chamelionic_web.html

Thanks again, Damian. 

Everyone: what are your thoughts on effectively leveraging your Web site to impact overall company revenues? Will 2009 be the year of conversion optimization? Send me your thoughts via Twitter: @ollie360.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how recruiting has changed over the last 6 months, from the little things to the big things.

Everyone always looks to talent, and reads thousands of resumes to find “talent”. Just because people put down a list of things they’ve done in the past, doesn’t mean they’re talented. “Involved in a team that generated lots of positive ROI” generally means that the company’s profits increased when they laid off the poor bastard.

Then we looked for drive and teamwork, because we knew that raw talent wasn’t enough. So we invented great questions like “are you a good team player?” (hate to meet the person who said no), and “what’s your favorite team sport” (rugby, because most of the team has their head up the hooker’s ass).

Chris Lyman, Fonality’s CEO/Janitor talked about measuring caring in an interview…. with the obvious harassment suit repercussions…. His comments inspired me to think more about how to measure all of the “intangibles” in an interview process. Because my shareholders will tell you I’ve done a lot of trial and error in this realm.

Last week I had one the of the best interviews ever. This guy was coming in as a senior level technical developer / architect, and after a quick set of introductions, he began grilling me, the CEO & Founder, about the company, our technology roadmap, what our customers were saying, where our biggest challenges were, what we were going to do with the company, etc…

This guy CARES. He doesn’t care about making a good impression on me. He doesn’t care about laying roses where I walk or about his specific job description. He CARES about the company that he’s going to join, not politics, perks, and position.

He didn’t care about what part of the code he would be working on. He didn’t care about how many people he could manage. He didn’t care whether the sodas were free (they are), or if the foosball table is broken (it is), or…

Why? Because he CARES about where the company is headed. He cares to know what kinds of challenges the company is facing. He cares what kind of team he is joining. And in the end, he knows that being part of a company that he CARES ABOUT is more important than a title of CEO or Janitor.

After 30 minutes of his questions, I learned far more about him than if I had used that time to ask him about his favorite hobbies or which programming languages he knew. Most importantly, I knew that if I put the company (or whatever small part of the company) in his hands, he would always put the company first in making his decisions. Not what he felt like doing. Not what I wanted. But what was best for the company.

 

Without a doubt, Google has changed the way we live our lives. Whether searching for information, shopping for shoes or comparing deals on your next vacation, there is hardly a time when we don’t just Google it.

While this cultural transformation came on fast, it didn’t come by accident. Since its inception, Google has strived towards one goal and one goal only (and no, it’s not refraining from being evil) and that goal is informational relevance.

It’s this relevance that has made Google the world wide hub for information, shopping, email and all things online. However, this dominance brings with it some pretty unique challenges. How do you stay one step ahead of the marketers looking to game the system to win a lion’s share of traffic for their site? How do you prevent spammers? In general, how do they stay one step ahead and keep everyone pursuing Google’s Holy Grail of informational relevance and premium user experience?

The answer is both simple and quite complex.

Google’s constant optimization and an obsessive commitment to user experience are simple. However, the way that this is executed upon is quite complex.

At the heart of this complexity is Google’s algorithm or the way that they measure relevance. It is a semi – black box mix of information rankings, taking many items into consideration. Keyword density in relation to the search query, URL naming conventions, overall performance and too many other factors to name here, all play into how pages are served when the user queries a search.

It’s this constant pursuit of the perfect experience that has kept Google modifying this algorithm and kept marketers, almost obsessively, asking what is the next step in the progression?

In a recent release, Google is saying that now, their quality score will be calculated in real time, dynamically every time a query is made.

So, it appears that the answer would not only be HOW the quality score is calculated, but HOW OFTEN. I guess it’s only logical. As technology continues to increase, and marketers continue to increase their savvy, this is another way for Google to raise the bar.

This new shift in the process is huge. As marketers scramble to figure out Google’s newest riddle, the firms providing real-time landing page optimization and behavioral targeting will become a marketing necessity.

If you’re landing pages are not providing relevance in real-time, your quality score will decline, along with your ranking and ROI, not to mentioned that your CPC will increase.

So, while real-time optimization is definitely “web 2.0” it may soon be the standard. When looking back at how fast Google went from being a new, boutique search engine to a business and cultural cornerstone, it is easy to envision these real-time optimizers as being another mandatory tool in the web marketers arsenal.

Wow! It just keeps getting better and better. Today, magnify360 was named Best-in-Show by VentureNet.

magnify360 was one of thirteen companies carefully scrutinized and invited to present to VentureNet’s audience of over 400 Southern California VC’s, angel investors and fellow technologists. And in spite of the very stiff competition, we won!!

Big congratulations to our ceo, founder and presenter, Olivier Chaine., and the whole team here. Very very well deserved. More updates on this to come.

From the VentureNet Site:

“VentureNet is your one chance to see the most innovative emerging technology companies and entrepreneurs in the Southern California region strut their stuff for venture capital and angel investors.”

What a great week for all of us at magnify360! Last Tuesday we announced that magnify360 closed its first round of financing from MHS Capital as well as from some of the original investors behind successes, like BlueLithium (Yahoo!), Right Media and BetterPPC. Read the press release.

Congrats to the team!

A little history on magnify360. The Company was founded in 2004 by  Olivier Chaine. With the dedication of few of the original team members here, he bootstrapped the company to profitability within two short year, opened another office in Shanghai, China and attracted the likes of clients, including Citrix Systems, Intuit, Service Magic (IAC), HSBC Bank, Packet8, Continental Warranty and other industry leaders. Might I add, our very first clients are still with us today.

The financing will predominantly focus on recruiting—we are growing fast-fast-fast. All of our available positions are here. Take a look, polish your resume and send it on in.  We’re on the hunt for bright, creative and quick minds.

The media coverage of our announcement was tremendous. magnify360 was featured in:

DowJones VentureWire

VentureBeat (BIG thank you to Matt Marshall)

SoCalTech

The blog of Ben Kuo, voice of SoCalTech (Thank you Ben!)

The Smart Show (contributed by Fransisco Dao of the FastCompany blog)

TechCrunchIT (What an honor! Thank you Cameron!)

PaidContent

Pulse2.0

…and many many other fantastic & well-respected outlets. Thanks to everyone, who covered the announcement. All can be viewed on the News section of www.magnify360.com.

While all of this was going on, Olivier was flying around the country delivering speeches at the Online Marketing Summit Summer Tour…Seattle, Denver, Atlanta…not to mention meetings in San Fransisco and back here in LA and our exhibit this week at San Jose’s Search Engine Strategies conference.

In between flights on layovers and in between meetings in the car, he was on the phone taking interviews. You see…Olivier doesn’t sleep. He’s an optimization machine.

Today, magnify360 was featured on the website, JumpIntoTomorrow.com—don’t forget to give us your vote as the featured Technology of the Day.

If there’s a site for die-hard techies, this one is it. It covers wayyy more than your run-of-the-mill online and consumer products technology site.

Here, you can find the most innovative technologies across industries that include medicine, architecture, cooking, sports, art, auto, fashion, environment, videogames, business and more.

We’re honored to have made it through their rigorous screening process to join the ranks of Compulsion, a technology that enables every element in a video to be clickable, The Soft House, a company that produces solar powered curtains that provide half the energy an average household needs in a day, and ReWalk, a semi-robotic suit that enables wheelchair users to stand, walk and climb. Amazing!

Olivier Chaine, magnify360’s CEO & founder, will be speaking at a few the stops along the Online Marketing Summit Summer Tour this year.

Catch Olivier’s best practices presentation in the following cities:

Seattle: August 7

Atlanta: August 12

Denver: August 14

San Diego: August 20

His presentation will take place at each stop from 1:30pm-2:40pm in the B-to-C Track:

Testing/Behavior Targeting
How to test for success and drive exponential conversion rate increases, putting A/B, multivariate and behavioral targeting technology to work.

For more information on the OMS Summer Tour please visit: www.onlinemarketingsummit.com

About OMS:
The objective of OMS is to educate, collaborate, network, and learn how to execute on the best known practices in Online Marketing. Events include hands-on workshops, on-site usability and SEO labs, thought-leadership presentations, and peer-to-peer collaboration on the subjects of:

* Social Media Strategies
* Search Engine Optimization
* Paid Search
* Website Usability
* Web Analytics and Tracking
* Email Marketing
* Content Management
* Site Search
* Website/Online Budgeting and Planning
* eCommerce
* Integrated Marketing
* Behavioral Targeting & Testing

If you’re planning on attending any of the tour stops and would like to connect, please let us know: marketing @ magnify360.com.