Knowing me, knowing you
- Article 37 of 77
- Information Age, May 2002
Psychological profiling: it works in murder hunts. Can it expose the traits of web site users?
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Behavioural analysis that does not rely on knowing real-world identities is, therefore, far more likely to produce effective results. And, because psychological profiling does not require any knowledge of personal data, it is a far less worrying idea for the average consumer and far less likely to clash with European privacy laws. “Do I have a right to see what a business thinks of me?” mulls Brown. “It's an interesting philosophical question.”
There are various ways to make psychological profiling work in practice. Both Site Intelligence, based in Didcot, UK, and Cambridge, UK-based NCorp, observe visitors' site interactions by using clickstream and search engine analysis. The UK car magazine Auto Trader, for example, uses NCorp's Ijen product on its web site to understand what is important to different customer types by observing the searches they make and the results that interest them. “It might find certain people are price sensitive, for example, or that they prefer prestige German cars,” suggests NCorp's CEO Nick Bidmead.
“You can pretty much do all personalisation by group without knowing the identity of the individual and flying into data protection implications,” says Mitchinson of SAS. “The vast majority of profiling isn't one-to-one marketing: it's done as tight segmenting, targeting groups of between 10 and 500 rather than a million.”
Raw technical information can also contribute to those psychological profiles. Web logs, together with JavaScript routines, can give information about the time zone, the Internet service provider (ISP) that provided the Internet connection used by the visitor, the referring page that linked to the site and the time of day at which the visitor arrived.
Site Intelligence's CEO John Woods says that his company's studies of consumers' ISPs have revealed interesting differences: “A Freeserve user is twice as likely as an AOL user to buy something online.”
Site Intelligence's products analyse the behaviour patterns of web site visitors, and Woods says the time of day that a customer arrives at a site can be significant. “During the working day, you'll get a lot of visitors who are sat at work, browsing sites for product information. They'll probably be in a hurry because they don't want to be caught not working. And they'll have relatively good jobs because they have Internet access. Those browsing in the evenings and at the weekend are a more general group. So you can customise your home page to make it give as much information as possible during the day, and alter it for the evenings and weekends.”
Organisations can also use the referring site (the site the user clicks through from) to gather demographic analysis. SAS's Mitchinson says the most common determinant used in lifestyle and behaviour analysis is the referring site. Ian Thomas, strategic development director for London-based WebAbacus, a start-up that develops a web-log analysis package of the same name, gives an example. “One organisation we worked with runs a recruitment site. They discovered the kinds of jobs people were looking for were very closely related to the search engine they came from by quite a wide margin. Those looking for IT jobs largely came from the Google search site, while those looking for secretarial jobs typically came from Ask Jeeves for instance.”
However, Thomas cautions against some of the claims made by various log analysis companies. “Some say you can narrow down which city the visitor comes from. What you end up discovering is there are apparently a lot of people in Leeds in the UK – but, actually, that's where Freeserve's based. A lot of log file analysis is intrinsically inaccurate and you have to work round it to get meaningful and defensible conclusions.”
According to SAS's Mitchinson, one of the benefits of this kind of clickstream and behavioural analysis is determining how visitors respond to and use the web site. “The biggest uplift comes from analysing how individuals use the organisation's web infrastructure and [analysing] which marketing campaigns are drawing in visitors. You can get average spend up by another 60%.” APR's Brown agrees, but says the uplift is more like 30%.
But computers are still a long way from understanding people. “How far have we got? About 5%. In my view, we're creating a piece of technology that's helpful and understands,” says Brown.
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