March 22, 2010 -- Yellowfin Business Intelligence an entirely new dimension in Location Intelligence has provide Jet Interactive with a significant competitive advantage. Australia’s leading inbound number provider has implemented Yellowfin’s integrated Business and Location Intelligence to its Call Tracker solution to extend the Marketing analytics available to their clients.

Traditionally, customers conducting multi-channel marketing campaigns have been able to analyse web data spatially in a limited way by using tools such as Google Analytics but they didn’t have a similar tool that would allow inbound call reporting.

Justin Graham, Jet’s CEO, had a vision to reshape the inbound call provision market by allowing customer’s call data to be analyzed as easily as their web data and with a far greater emphasis on the spatial component. He sought a solution that would use GIS to allow customer’s to visualize their call data and regional statistical and demographic data in conjunction with standard tabular data.

The inability of marketing professionals to access timely and accurate data to track the effectiveness / ROI of their marketing campaigns had long been a major problem that required a GIS solution. The challenge was to find a solution that would be a combination of GIS and Business Intelligence and could be deployed as a SAAS platform and that offered the ease of use required by his target market.

Justin’s users are not GIS experts – they are business users typically from the marketing department that want to view their data spatially and have the ability to manipulate the spatial component of their reports via the web. Having a desktop application was not an option – delivery had to be via the web.

As part of what Jet does it collects tens of thousands of call data records (CDR) for their customers per day, and these provide a reference where the call came from – the originating exchange. Graham knew that by taking this exchange data and overlaying the Australian Bureau of Statistics data, his customers could also look into the demographic profile of callers. Jet used a mapping service to geocode all the 6000 exchanges across Australia to provide both centroid point data as well as polygons for each telephone exchange. This was stored as WKB geometry reference data in their call tracking data warehouse. The MySQL data warehouse contains call summary data for each telephone number used across all of the customers marketing campaigns.

Yellowfin’s approach to Location Intelligence is to tackle it from a Business Intelligence perspective rather than the more traditional GIS one. This means that the Yellowfin treats spatial data as another, albeit complex data type that needs to be available for both tablature as well as visualization based reporting. Yellowfin has developed optimization techniques such as intelligent caching and multi-layering to overcome the performance issues that non-GIS tools often have when rendering large multipolygons. This innovation means that not only are the queries not slowed down by grouping on geometry, but the geometry data need only ever be brought back from the database once. The result - reports that are incredibly fast to run – something, which web users simply expect.

By using Yellowfin the difficult issues with combining disparate datasets, spatial and non-spatial, into easy to use reports were solved. Yellowfin’s unique ability to not only query traditional BI data but also render spatial data such a point and polygons has enabled Jet to merge their call data seemlessly with census data and provide their customers with an unparalleled level of data visualisation and understanding of their callers demographic profile.

Graham says “Yellowfin’s integrated Location Intelligence allowed the call data to be analyzed as easily as web site traffic”, explaining that he sought a solution that would use maps to allow his customer’s to visualize their call data and regional demographic data in conjunction with standard tabular data. “Many providers offer their clients basic inbound statistics, but this misses the rich insight that can be gained when including spatial data into the analysis,” says Graham. “The benefit that we got with a product like Yellowfin was that it all came out of the box – fully integrated. This allowed us to rapidly develop a highly interactive portal for our customers who are not GIS experts but business people who simply need to visualize their data spatially”.

Integrated Location Intelligence has allowed Jet to create a more sophisticated call analytics tool than what Google Analytics offers because of the geographic and demographic data used. Customers can see a range of integrated data for very small geographic areas, increasing the level of complexity of analysis that can be conducted.

Life for marketing professionals has changed dramatically. They can now generate accurate and timely reports that calculate the customer conversion rate, where the call originated from, as well as showing the demographics of that location. From here they can ask how does this fit with our products positioning and branding? Will this call have a higher conversion rate than other locations? What’s the population density and does this impact the propensity to call? Without call tracker’s spatial analysis they could not answer these types of questions.

Since using Yellowfin for its Call Tracker solution, Jet’s customers have the ability to query the “where” as well as the “what” and the “when” from the call data collected, providing them with a distinct competitive advantage and a tangible way to track and measure the ROI of any marketing campaign and channel.

By combining Call Analytics with Location Intelligence, customers are able to track the success of their traditional and online advertising campaigns as they happen, allowing them to optimize their advertising spend by region and population segmentation.

www.yellowfinbi.com

More information about Jet Interactive can be accessed at http://www.jetinteractive.com.au/