Business Intelligence World

Home-Work 6 Info Graphic Resume (PREZUME)

2012-04-21T23:22:00.001-07:00

I was asked to make a info graphic resume so I prepared this time with help of prezi after watching several resumes at Dr. Ram's website on www.insite.eller.arizona.edu
I tried making my prezume and also the link for it is
http://prezi.com/eosznkf-8hlg/kapil-goyals-prezume/

Also you can download this prezume and watch it offline from the below mentioned link:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/46840843/Kapil_Goyal_HW6.exe

I hope you enjoy watching the prezume :))

Cheers!!
Kapil

Excited with GOMC

2012-03-04T19:25:00.002-08:00

Its March, I am anxiously waiting for Spring Break and also excited that our GOMC campaign has started moving. We have three campaigns i.e. Tucson festival of Books, Food, Mexican American. Ad's has started appearing and we are short of our budget in few hours every day. CTR seems to be quiet nice for Tucson Festival of Books Campaign.
Here how it looks like:

We have limited the keywords and no started using keywords which are getting more traffic.

Getting Started with Gephi-First Graph

2012-02-28T17:41:00.002-08:00

Couple of days ago, I downloaded this tool and wanted to do some R&D with it.I started to get graph data using netvizz – facebook to gephi.
and generated a .GDF file for BI group on facebook. I got 72 nodes and 1652 edges. In this case, the nodes are people and the edges show that one person is following another. Here are some of the screen-shots of how I generated Gephi graph. I really found this tutorial posted on blackboard by Dr. Ram to be helpful. Kindly refer more for these graphs on that tutorial.

2/22/2012...Introduction to graph Theory

2012-02-28T15:33:00.002-08:00

In the lecture given by Dr. Sudha Ram on Graph theory, she started with Königsberg Graph's theory and the bridges that graph theory was all about edges, nodes and connecting them together. She discussed about Informational networks which help move information move from one place to another and how today they were looked in the context of social media. One major area of discussion was constructing a Collaboration Network where you try to find the shortest path between 2 nodes to build a transportation network with the help of hubs.

She told about degree which is number of links that are connected to a node. In-degree in which incoming edges are counted for a node and in out-degree outgoing edges are counted for a note.

Some questions which were answered were: what we are going to do to grow the nodes? How am I going to connect nodes in network using directed or undirected nodes?

We learned about the Giant graph component on web where significant portion or nodes o websites are connected to each other and there are very few nodes which are not connected to each other. Two huge graphs could be compared based on average degree, one with more average degree is well connected with another.

Another concept was Small World Phenomenon in which a study of WWW and social media shows that if we take any pair of nodes, there is a surprisingly less distance between two arbitrary nodes.

Below is a graph which I generated using Gephi from facebook data. In this case, the nodes are people and the edges show that one person is following another. Generated .gdf file using netvizz – facebook to gephi

Journey so Far till precampaign report - GOMC

2012-02-21T22:22:00.000-08:00

So Far So Good!!
We gave presentation for our campaign strategy to Dr. Ram telling her about our client i.e. University Press (University of Arizona) and how we designed campaigns to progress towards our goal and increase profits for our clients. She gave us a nice feedback on how to improve our pre campaign report for Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC). There were around 7 teams which gave the presentation and had talks about their respective clients. The main thing which I personally liked about this campaign is its three week period which is most challenging task in order to increase the profits of client using ad-words on Google, while some of its benefits are that we get a certificate from Google if we have a client which is Non Profit Organization (NPO) and $250 assigned to every team to advertise for their client.

We had 3 campaigns which were:
1. Tucson Festival of Books
2. Mexican American Chicano Movement
3. Foods of Sonoran Desert

We have goal to sell around 20 books online during this three week period on which our client is providing 20% discount after downloading coupons from University Press Website (http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/). We decided to sell 20 books which are on average $20-25 per copy or at-least one $250 book. Well, to conclude I am more interested in knowing more about concepts from Dr Sudha Ram in this course MIS 587 and give my best shot with the team to win this case competition and visit Google's Headquarters with team and Dr. Ram.

Appendix:
Client Website: http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/
GOMC project: http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/

Strategies for Pre Campaign GOMC

2012-02-21T20:58:00.000-08:00

In the lecture by Dr. Ram today on Long Tail Keywords, I hope we can get a lot more still on this project. The keyword matching options for our ads to pop up in front was a very tactical strategy. Well coming on to Long Tail Keywords(MandelBrot--Father of Long Tail), Long tail keywords are a type of keyword phrase that has at least three, and some times as many as five words in the phrase. Long tail keywords are used when the website wants to refine search terms to the web page, as well as when the searcher is looking for something rather specific. Like normal keywords, long tail keywords are used to define what is on the web page and what the publisher wants to be found under in search engines and on search engine results pages. These keywords are highly specific, and draw less traffic for the website, but tend to draw more quality traffic, which leads in more conversions than normal keywords. Long tail keywords can also be used by publishers and visitors in different ways.

5 Myths about Long Tail Keywords:

1) Long tail keywords won’t bring you much traffic.

2) Long Tail Keywords aren’t worth the trouble.

3) Long tail keywords are for established websites.

4) 1 Long tail keyword per piece of content.

5)Only focus on long tail keywords.

Benefiting from the Long Tail:

1. There is less competition so you can rank on the first page of Google for long tail keywords far easier than ranking for short tail keywords

2. If you target lots of long tail keywords you can get lots of easy traffic

3. The visitors searching for long tail keywords know exactly what they want, be it ‘Small Business Web Design’ or ‘Half Price Armani Suits’, they know exactly what they want and hopefully you can provide it to them.

Optimization of Social Spaces

2012-02-15T09:22:00.000-08:00

Today we had a seminar by Gilad Loton, head of R&D for a startup called SocialFlow.

The summary of his Seminar is as:

· Attentive to signals we can map out ppl n make better decisions, Take data and visualize it.See it.For example, Al jazeera audience

· Twitter is important in media world. Media entities are publishing their content through twitter, people publish news as it happens

· Journalists have wider following

· We use data to help if our perceptions lie on what is really happening

· Size of audience does not matter to get more engagement.When u say it.u just say it.

· It’s a great platform to spread information

· He told about network mapping of audience that how they grab contents and map them.
Check what topics appear more often and generate graphs using Gephi.

· People are interested in topics. Some are quiet. For example, the news of earthquake spread like a fire as it happened in USA, so that people from Richmond knew it sometime earlier.

· Make technologies more effective we need to see what audience is talking now and if their topics are addressed we can visualize how sort they fit in.

· They compare audiences..TCOT—top conservatives on twitter.

· Check how different audience behave differently

· He gave an example of coffee shop that how sharp spikes for keyword ‘COFFEE’ are observed in morning in morning.’TIRED’ rise in evening.some other keywords were starbucks, coffee, morning, tired.

· Game starts and game end.at end tons of excitement..They algorithmically extract n identify the peak

· People’s perception of one candidate….just by lookin at language.We can understand people’s perception..Justin Beiber and Economist—how many people follow it combined..

· Nasa to map data about aurora b/c people publish data..if u mind it in grt way u cn make grt advances in science..space n time helps tweets..bitly..u cn get information and u get ur own hashtag. Cn see how many ppl click wen u actually send it..we use data to help if our perceptions lie on what is really happening

· Mapping info flows..Us army killed osama on sunday night & news came..monday mornin..big headlines..twitter broke the news..ppl started buzzing abt it…

· Cheering for Yankees..hashtag..we saw who participated..data laid out by social hops..to visualize data..

· As Debbie Chachra writes on Twitter: “Urban rioting existed before SMS/social media. You know what didn’t? Large-scale community cleanups, spontaneously organized within hours.”

· Know ur audience—what they tak,,hw they r connected..We build all these mental models..People who follow me..what they tend to like..But as n/w grows it would be difficult to keep it in head..we need to make better decisions

· Topic+Timing+Network.

Paradigm Shift in Online Advertising

2012-02-10T12:32:00.000-08:00

These days online advertising is becoming far more interesting than the traditional source of advertisement due to:

1. Localization: better local ad based targeting based on geographical location

2. The other is COST PER ACTION rather than COST PER CLICK. Paying for ads based on cost per action means that one does not pay the publisher until he/she gets the action desired from the ad. For example, if an advertiser wants its banner ad to drive someone to an online store to buy the advertised product, then the company won't have to pay until someone actually clicks the ad and completes the purchase.

Another growth area is “branded entertainment”, where advertisers and broadcasting executives thoroughly plan shows to achieve maximum brand impact. The stated goal is to avoid traditional advertising’s pitfalls: “to tightly weave a brand or product into content and to counter consumers growing habit of zapping, zipping or otherwise avoiding traditional commercial pitches” (The New York Times, July 21, 2005).

CONCLUSIONS
The advertising industry is undergoing a momentous time of change worldwide. The crisis of the 30-second spot and the lackluster performance of traditional media like terrestrial television, print and radio are having a profound influence in advertising-supported media. In a way, the advertising industry is disrupted by technology. So they are terrestrial broadcasting, publishing and radio. Advertising follows consumers. And consumers are talking loud. They like good ads that travel increasingly around the internet. But they do not like excess. Technology makes increasingly difficult for advertising to appear as an interruption: consumers are more in control. A better audience understanding will help companies in those industries to develop advertising strategies that are relevant to consumers. The emergence of online advertising, innovative out-of home solutions and “branded entertainment” will continue to draw researchers’ and industry attention. This situation calls for a revamp in the way advertising media plans are laid out.

ONLINE ADVERTISING-->CPC,CTR,ROI,Quality Score, Ad Rank

2012-02-10T10:56:00.000-08:00

The term online advertising is simply a term that relates to advertising online, or advertising over the Internet. In practice online advertising is about getting your website in front of the people who are interested in your product or service.
The thing to notice here is that you have to pay different every time your ad gets clicked.The key terms here are: High Ad rank, Quality Score, CPC, CTR
Ad Rank=f(CPC, Quality Score)
You dont want to keep bidding more and more but you wold like to increase your Quality Score by CTR i.e. Click Through Rate.
CTR= no of clicks / no of impressions
If your keyword matches what people are searching for and once your ad starts appearing up, your CTR is going to go up and sometimes it is difficult to achieve high CTR in small business. 1-2% is a good CTR. ROI is calculated by how much u spend and how much u gain from ur campaign which is defined by number of conversions and not just the high CTR.
You can calculate your ROI when u r not selling anything..for ex school video when you are a non profit
how much u r saving than how much are u spending.Reason u do this b/c u want to calculate performance management.

A superbowl ad may cost $3.5million for 30 second. In your Pay-per-Click campaign, a quality score is shown for each keyword. Quality Score is used in several different ways, including influencing your keywords’ actual cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and estimating the first page bids that you see in your account.

In your Pay-per-Click campaign, a quality score is shown for each keyword. Quality Score is used in several different ways, including influencing your keywords’ actual cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and estimating the first page bids that you see in your account.

Are you Twitteroholic or Facebookoholic?

2012-02-05T22:01:00.000-08:00

Social Media has become one of the aspects in which every company begins to investigate when they are looking to ramp up their online marketing efforts. Particularly in the past couple of years, we are constantly advised that using FaceBook and Twitter to increase our presence and connect with our customers is paramount to our success. So how useful and powerful are these elements really?

Twitter and FaceBook, can be used to highlight the features and issues that companies want to promote, and at the same time conveniently ignore any grievances or complaints of customers. Unless those customers have their own prominent Twitter following, they are unlikely to get much traction, and the company can focus more on the customers who are positive. For example, a company can post a link to its ad campaign, which will be viewed by thousands, and then reply to followers who are relatively commendatory of the campaign and the products being sold.

The current vogue of using social networking, particularly FaceBook and Twitter, has led to them both being avenues of advertising that people are willing to actively accept. Customers will opt-in to view your posts, which gives you an impressive base of followers that you know are a key part of your demographic. Currently, there is an acceptance from these people to digest your marketing without the usual heavy veil of cynicism that has begun to plague traditional forms of marketing. If you play your cards right, it can lead to a general rise in your brand worth that is hard to come by through other media.

Source @ http://businessontwitter.co.uk/twitter/2010/12/using-social-media-to-promote-your-brand-image/

InMaps--The New Buzz in the city

2012-02-05T20:44:00.000-08:00

Are you a LinkedIn User, well if yes you get to know about the these LinkedIn Inmaps..
Now you will ask me WHY?

To visualize what your network looks like
Would your connections form clusters or group
Do you know that you and your connections are related to each other
You can also identify hubs between your professional networks

Well, I think these pictures say more than 1000 words


My LinkedIn Inmaps

InMaps is an interactive visual representation of your professional universe that answers all of the above questions. It’s a great way to understand the relationships between you and your entire set of LinkedIn connections. With it you can better leverage your professional network to help pass along job opportunities, seek professional advice, gather insights, and more.
Here’s how it works: your map is color-coded to represent different affiliations or groups from your professional career, such as your previous employer, college classmates, or industries you’ve worked in.

Making use of Online data to improve your offline business

2012-01-31T18:42:00.000-08:00

Are you potentially missing out by not using knowledge of your online/website visitors to improve your offline marketing success? (Offline could mean printed media, trade fairs, radio, in-store etc.)

These days websites are not just the source of letting people know what their nature is or what are they about. Their mission has changed in the sense what they do, in short websites are not just for informational purpose these days. Today they are action oriented, they want people to visit themselves and let people do some conversions on them. For example, an alumni visiting eller college website and may be interested in donating or help in internships or jobs.

1. There are ways to measure the success of offline marketing campaigns using website analytics! For example, create a landing page with a memorable URL, like yoursite.com/specialoffer or yoursite.com/radio, and direct campaign ads there. Tracking visitors and their “journey” from the landing page through your site will help quantify the success of your campaign.

2. A new landing page for each type of offline activity will also help you to track numbers and conversion rates for visitors attracted via each type of advertisement or offline activity.

Using online analytics to influence offline marketing

Have you ever considered using all that information you can access about your online customers to help shape up your offline marketing efforts?

As Dr. Ram gave an example in class about Ataccama that how they got to know about her when she decided to use their data profiler tool for the last year's class or take a example where a bicycle store owner may find one of his most popular articles involves basic maintenance tasks, like changing a tire or lubricating the chain. In this case, a basic bike maintenance clinic might help draw website customers into the store.
Most analytics track where people come from and where they go when they leave your online store. Again, this information could uncover a need your store can fill. In the bicycle store example above, you may find people are leaving to visit bicycle trail maps – perhaps organizing a group ride would help draw people to your store and help them find the best local cycling routes.

Aspects of Google Analytics

2012-01-24T18:51:00.000-08:00

Dr. Ram in her third lecture told us about 2 aspects of google analytics.
1. Mechanical Aspect: It relates to some things on your blog like How do I set timeline, What is it showing, different widgets present on dashboards.
She told us that KPI's were kind of metrics itself which are tightened into objectives and goals or how we gaze health by looking certain indicators whether we are reaching it or going down.

She told us about Avinash Kaushik's blog and Devi added more interest to my curiosity by telling us how Avinash uses his concepts to explain things and as I read it I came across many interesting articles which I am posting here on my blog today.

"What is the difference between a metric and a key performance indicator (KPI)?"

"What is a dimension in analytics?"
"What is segmentation?"
"Are goals metrics?"
And many more.

Goals:

Goals are specific strategies you'll leverage to accomplish your business objectives.

It goes something like this. . .
Sell more stuff really means we have to:

The beauty of goals is that they reflect specific strategies. They are really DUMB:

Doable. Understandable. Manageable. Beneficial.

. They are priorities

Metric:

A metric is a number.

That is the simplest way to think about it.
Technically a metric can be a Count (a total) or a Ratio (a division of one number by another).
Examples of metrics that are a Count is Visits or Pageviews.

Key Performance Indicator:
Key performance indicators (KPI's) are metrics. But not normal metrics. They are our BFF's(Best Friends forever)
A key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that helps you understand how you are doing against your objectives.

I run www.bestbuy.com. My business objective is to sell lots of stuff. My web analytics KPI is: Average Order Size.

I run www.nytimes.com. My business objective is to make money. One of my KPI's is: Visitor Loyalty (number of visits to the site by the same person in a month) and another one is # of clicks on banner ads.

No matter how metrics rich you are. You'll be information poor. Forever. So. Don't be.

Business Objectives -> Goals -> KPI's -> Metrics -> Magic.

Dimension:

A dimension is, typically, an attribute of the Visitor to your website.

The activity a person performed such as the landing page name, the subsequent pages they saw, videos they played, searches they did on your website and the products they purchased are all dimensions.
Finally the day they visited, the days since their last visit (if returning visitor) the number of visits they made, the number of pages they saw are all dimensions as well. I know, I know, they sound like metrics. But they are, as the definition says up top, attributes of the visitor and their activity on your website.

2nd Aspect of GA:
Analytical Aspect: Here we ask questions..Why Peaks and Valleys? When they are happening? from Where people are coming from?..Why this is happening?

Believe me once you get over this, it would become a nice addiction..:)

Google Analytics for Business Intelligence

2012-01-18T19:37:00.000-08:00

Today we started new chapter on Google Analytics. Dr Ram gave an overview about BI, Data Profiling and Cleansing, KPI's, Web Metrics, Google Analytics and last but not the least she told us about 6 W's principle:
WHAT, WHO,WHERE,WHEN,WHICH,WHY

Coming on to google analytics, I installed google analytics tracking code on my website today(Ohh I should have done it a month before, such a nice thing to track and manage your data) using the link:

http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55488

Also I added Google Adsense, Cool Gadgets which are really useful to my users who are visiting the website like they can search amazon on a single click.

Also I am posting the video of how to install google analytics tracking code on your blogspot.

Also the below mentioned video is the crux of the blog today i.e.
Google Analytics for Business Intelligence

Lets get Started with BI

2012-01-16T21:38:00.000-08:00

I was always curious to learn this Business Intelligence thing from my Green Field training days at Accenture. They used to call it Business Warehouse those days. I am excited and little bit filled with this eery feeling of my new journey into the beautiful world of DATA and my morning class at 8am. We had first class with Dr. Sudha Ram and she gave a brief overview of BI and Google analytic for which we would be making our team project.

Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

Business intelligence applications can be:

Mission-critical and integral to an enterprise's operations or occasional to meet a special requirement
Enterprise-wide or local to one division, department, or project
Centrally initiated or driven by user demand

This term was used as early as September, 1996, when a Gartner Group report said:

By 2000, Information Democracy will emerge in forward-thinking enterprises, with Business Intelligence information and applications available broadly to employees, consultants, customers, suppliers, and the public. The key to thriving in a competitive marketplace is staying ahead of the competition. Making sound business decisions based on accurate and current information takes more than intuition. Data analysis, reporting, and query tools can help business users wade through a sea of data to synthesize valuable information from it - today these tools collectively fall into a category called "Business Intelligence."

Coming on to Google analytics, I read this good article which tells us about it:

Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. The product is targeted towards marketers rather than webmasters and technologists.
GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and even digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.
Integrated with AdWords, users can optimize online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions. Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using GA, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimize or cull campaigns.

Link to the above reference can be found @ http://www.crunchbase.com/product/google-analytics

What is Business Intelligence?

2012-01-10T19:24:00.000-08:00

What is Business Intelligence?

2012-01-10T18:25:00.000-08:00