How Companies Learn Your Secrets

A fascinating and in-depth article in the New York Times - covering predictive analytics, habit formation, new product marketing psychology, ethical considerations and scaring customers.  Definitely worth a read by anyone interested in understanding how sophisticated the analytics initiatives are at some of the world's largest retailers. Beyond that it goes into a very interesting discussion on the psychology of habit which would be broadly interesting to anyone.

It begins... Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”       

The full article can be found here.

Predicting Bounce Rates in Sponsored Search Advertisements

Here is an interesting paper on research into utilizing predictive analytics  to predict the likelihood of someone bouncing from an online ad (i.e. specifically Google Adwords). The practical definition of bounce is someone clicking on your ad, coming to your site, and leaving pretty much immediately. That is to say, they took one look, were not impressed (generally because they found it irrelevant to what they were looking for or did not like the look of your site).

The researchers found that predictive analytics could be used to increase the ability to predict the likelihood of someone bouncing. To quote an excerpt from the conclusion "We have also shown that even in the absense of substantial clickthrough data, bounce rate may be estimated through machine learning when applied to features extracted from sponsored search advertisements and their landing pages"

The full paper written by D. Sculley, Robert Malkin, Sugato Basu and Roberto Bayardo can be found here.