Yesterday, BlueKai announced the second edition of its BlueKai Pulse which looks at intent data across its data exchange through the end of November. The report offers insights on consumer buying trends much like the company’s new analytics tool, BlueKai In-Market Reports, which includes access to a a panel of 160 million unique users across online retail and comparison shopping sites according to the company.
Here are example results provided by BlueKai for video game equipment that you might expect during the run-up to the Holidays – and people want a Wii!…
Get the latest BlueKai Pulse here.
So what is intent? According to the release: “Shopping intent is defined as search and shopping related activities by consumers on retail and price comparison sites.”
AdExchanger.com asked BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol for more insights on the insights…
AdExchanger.com: Can you get in the weeds a bit and explain the technology side of how BlueKai generates “Pulse” observations?
OT: BlueKai captures commercial intent through pixels that are integrated into the largest commerce sites on the web. For example, when an anonymous consumer shops for a Sony Bravia flat panel tv, BlueKai, tags that consumer as in-market for a Bravia flat panel tv. That tag is captured in the consumer’s browser cookie, but it is also logged as an event on our back end. This shopping event is then captured and aggregated with billions of shopping interactions every month. This allows BlueKai to mine for patterns that provide insights into how consumer’s behaviors are changing. The BlueKai Pulse report is our way of sharing those high-level insights with the industry.
AdExchanger.com: Do you have any sense of the shelf life (time value) of intent data?
OT: Intent behaviors are most valuable when they are first created. Over time, a consumer will buy the item they are shopping for – so intent behavior is best served fresh before a competitor accesses that behavior and converts that customer into a buyer. You can visualize this with a conversion decay curve by graphing conversions against time. This curve will show the highest number of buy conversions very early and fewer conversions a month later. Given this dynamic, each vertical has a different decay curve. For example, the conversion curve for in-market auto decays much slower than the conversion curve for a smaller ticket purchase like an iPod. One of the advantages of an auction system like BlueKai’s is that buyers can set their own price depending on the granularity and freshness of the data.
By John Ebbert
