ObservePoint’s Founder speaks out about Web Analytics Audit Software

Interview with: Robert K Seolas, Co-founder and CEO, ObservePoint

We recently had an opportunity to interview Robert Seolas, Co-Founder of ObservePoint.  ObservePoint is a partner of Lima Consulting Group and is the software that we use to conduct web audits for Omniture’s SiteCatalyst products, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, and other popular web analytics solutions.

Q: Why did you start ObservePoint?

RS: My partner in ObservePoint, John Pestana, was a Co-Founder of Omniture, one of the world’s foremost Web analytics platforms. Before retiring from Omniture, John knew the company received regular calls from customers who often complained that their analytics software wasn’t working. They always wanted to blame Omniture, but when there were hiccups, most of the time it was because there were problems with the tagging on their websites. read more

Focusing on Content, Not Just Ads

For quite a while, the concentration in online analytics and tools to optimize results based on analytics revolved around ad optimization.  It was a world of sellers.  The focus was always on systems which could improve a company’s ability to recommend relevant products, increase conversions, and acquire traffic with increasing efficiency.  The solutions were skewed towards helping the sellers sell their ads, while putting less emphasis on the delivery of primary content.

Predictive Analytics are Ready for Early Adopters: Super Cool Sneaks from the Adobe Summit

Adobe announced their embedded forecasting and predictive models into Adobe Social, Discover and SiteCatalyst at their Annual Summit today.

I blogged about predictive analytics in my annual prediction for marketing trends entry for 2012, where I indicated that this would be the year for the early adopters to begin bringing these capabilities to digital marketing.

It’s here.

There are too many instances to mention, and many more that I expect are coming as the Product Development Teams begin to insert the Efficient Frontier (EF) models underneath the platform as underpinnings to nearly all of the products.  EF, in case you aren’t familiar with them, used Nobel-prize-winning Henry Markowtiz models called the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) to apply the models that help financial engineers balance risk and returns on the stock market (which is essentially an auction) to the similar problem of risk (as defined by volatility and conversion metrics) and the price of keywords, which again is essentially an auction.  They’ve been around for over about a decade, and employ seven PhDs in the field.  I attended their workshops, and began to assess how these models will be embedded into the underpinnings of the Online Marketing Platform from Adobe.

So here are three things that impressed me, and keep in mind that since the EF acquisition only happened six weeks ago, none of the models have been incorporated into the platform at this time.

The Adobe SiteCatalyst product will be releasing The Navigator feature, there are new predictive analytics capabilities in the Discover 3.0 product and Abode Social shines the headlights around the corner to predict sentiment and help marketers more carefully use words that will increase engagement. read more