New spin on Web marketing
Internet giant Yahoo goes beyond number crunching and uses science to gain insights into online behaviour. GRACE CHNG reports in Sunnyvale, California
Online advertisers are no longer satisfied with merely knowing how long surfers spend on a website. Instead, they are demanding more data to target their commercials at the right audience.
What sort of data? Those that involve 'deep science' and an insight into online behaviour, according to Yahoo.
This means that having an army of number crunchers is not enough. Economists, sociologists and computer scientists will have to get on board too.
Yahoo has just such a team of multi-disciplinary experts mining its base of some 630 million visitors to its home page every month.
They produce something akin to academic studies, like how to encourage users to make repeat visits to sites or what makes different users come together to a particular site.
Mr Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice-president of Yahoo Labs, said: 'I can't walk into a university and recruit the students there. They need to know computer science, economics, sociology and cognitive psychology.'
As an example, he cited Professor Duncan Watts, a principal research scientist who directs the company's Human Social Dynamics group. He holds a degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University in the United States. His research is on social networks and collective dynamics.
Mr Prabhakar noted that some companies are paying television celebrities to promote their products on Twitter. For instance, Kim Kardashian, of the reality TV show Keeping Up With The Kardashians, was paid US$10,000 (S$12,700) per tweet to promote a product. Are these advertisers getting bang for their buck?
'Now, influence on Twitter is measured by the number of re-tweets,' he said.
'Prof Watts' research was: What's the right returns for a single tweet? His finding, which was published in Advertising Age magazine, was that social epidemics, which influence people on social networks, were rare and unpredictable.
'The advertising dollar would be better spent on people with average influence on a social network.'
In an interview with Digital Life in January at Yahoo's corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, Mr Prabhakar cited another form of targeted marketing.
For online auctions, for example, advertisers would traditionally focus on the masses.
But the Yahoo team allows advertisers to bid for a specific behaviour. For example, a potential advertiser can be offered one million specific e-mail messages on Christmas day to do e-mail marketing.
'We can further finetune this group: males versus females and the type of content they favour. Our job is to match the supply (of the users) with the demand (by online advertisers) with a market design that is based on economics.'
The challenge for organisations is to be able to continue the relationship once the link has been made between the advertiser and consumer.
Said Ms Judy Wong, director of business and marketing relations at SIM Global Education: 'Let's say I've already blasted the initial messages about an education with SIM. I have people who are interested in our courses. How do I continue this relationship?'
In this case, she uses students to front SIM's campaign by getting them to write blogs, host online forums and participate in online discussions about how SIM provides a comprehensive education system
'What this does is that any time an interested person in Vietnam or anywhere in the world wants to check us out, he can go to our website to find out what students are saying about campus activities and campus life.
'This part is always changing. Blogs and online discussions change all the time. This is where traditional media fails,' she said.
NEW WAYS OF MARKETING
Mr Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice-president of Yahoo Labs, gives his take on the new ways of targeting advertising.
What excites a user about a story on the Yahoo home page?
The usual way
'We measure this using eye-tracking machines on a group of users in our labs. We map the path their eyes take, like where they start to read on a page, how they move from story to story, what do they click on first and so on. But we can't bring a million people into our labs.'
The new way
'One scientist, who is also trained as a psychologist, designed a software that simulated the visual cortex of the brain so as to predict where a person's gaze will fall on a page. Now, we can simulate our experiment by testing one million users to get a better understanding of user reading behaviour.'
How do we increase the click through rate of stories?
The usual way
'Traditionally, Yahoo's editors select the news stories to place them in specific slots on the home page.'
The new way
'Editors must decide on stories and where to place them but a special software watches what stories people click on. The software learns what stories get read more often and continue to highlight them.
'But we can't ignore the new stories that emerge. So we put them together with the more popular stories.
'When we did that, we found that the click through rate on those parts of the home page went up by 100 per cent.
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