A young firm is promising clarity on website visitors; CBR talks to Trovus CEO Ed Charvet.
Q. Looking at your company’s Web site, I can’t see what is unique about what you do; you just tell me who’s visited my site. How is that helpful in this day and age?
A. It’s fair to say that classic IP address resolution – tracking an IP address back to the originating address to see where it’s come from – is something that goes right back to the start of the Web, yes. But what we do is to take that technology and wrap a lot of service around it.
Organisations need to know who has visited their site in response to a particular bit of campaigning to track the effectiveness of their marketing spend, which we provide as a basis. But what Trovus then does is to provide intelligence on the relationship and profiling of that responding organisation to a level of great detail. That is then tracked on to your sales and marketing efforts to make them in turn that much more efficient and responsive. The question we will help you solve is, ‘Are my Web activities relevant to my target audience?’
Q. But isn’t this what Google does – track visitors? And half the people on the ‘Net thinks that’s a very evil thing.
A. No, no – this is nothing at all to do with personal data. We are tracking organisational, not individual response.
Q. So it’s good old email marketing or CRM?
A. We align with email marketing and can integrate with CRM, yes, but this is genuinely a new, emerging market category, which may explain the confusion. Gartner calls this customer-centric Web strategies and has it as a definite ‘up’ in the Hype Cycle. I do have to say that in my mind, the marketplace is very young. But it’s exciting and growing – there is huge interest in getting a fuller, richer picture for marketeers on customer reaction to their online messaging work.
Q. Maybe an example would help, as I am still not sure I ‘get it’.
A. Two years ago no-one did! But in the last six to twelve months, the proportion of people saying, ‘I didn’t know you could do that’ is dropping fast – I think this is a technology whose time has come. In any case, we are being used by a range of B2B publishers like the Financial Times and Lexis-Nexis to track reader reactions to promotions and a really good example is where we helped a mid-size law firm, Morgan Cole Solicitors, to win new business around data protection advice; like many of the firms we work with,it needed to enhance its existing email and direct mailing campaigns by finding ways to target qualified organisations and individuals more effectively and we helped pay back the investment it had made with us in under a month.
Q. All sounds good – but isn’t this the CMO’s problem, not the CIO’s?
A. The budgets we draw on are held by marketeers, yes. But increasingly we see CIOs being brought in too. What’s happening is that the IT leader is now expected to have responsibility not just for the organisation’s apps but everything that sits on top, including the Web presence. The CIO was always a key influencer here and ultimately the implementer if you like, but now they are part of the conversation. I think that’s more than the business saying, ‘This is plumbing/technology so it’s your problem’ – I think it’s about their input at board level on how to make the most use of the Web.
Q. So what is your message to the CBR audience?
A. As technologies like geo-location and behavioural targeting come online, there’s going to be more and more pressure to get better and better at understanding exactly what your website is doing and if it is working to help the business. That’s something we will all have to get right – so now is a good time to look at what will help.
For more info visit www.trovus.co.uk.
