Predictive Analytics: 3 Case Studies in Seeing the Future

Image source: Erik Khalitov, iStock

Predictive analytics can help you use past data to predict likely future outcomes. While these techniques have long been used in forecasting, risk aversion, and even fraud detection, in the digital world, predictive can be extremely powerful.

These days the amount of digital marketing data and the availability of enormous processing power make the application of predictive analytics in the digital marketing space particularly exciting. It can be used to predict a likely lifetime customer value or the probability of customer loyalty or churn, and predictive techniques can also be used to gain insights into the best ways to allocate marketing budgets or understand the likely effectiveness of potential campaigns.

Check out this month’s Marketing Land column, What can predictive analytics REALLY do? Three case studies in seeing the future, which describes how a company in the auto aftermarket industry used predictive analytics to optimize digital spend towards actions that were highly predictive of future revenue; how U.S. Cellular received a 61% lift in visitor lifetime value by identifying which on-site actions were most likely to lead to purchases; and how a fashion retail group used predictive analytics to understand where to allocate their advertising budget and avoid spending money on sales that they would have acquired through organic means anyway.

Read the whole article on Marketing Land.

Want to learn more about predictive analytics? Hear more about how U.S. Cellular prioritized its website testing using insights from purchase intent analysis in this on-demand webinar featuring U.S. Cellular’s Digital Analytics Manager, Katie Birmingham.

David Booth

David is a founding partner and principal consultant at Cardinal Path, as well as an author, instructor, adjunct professor, and regular speaker. As a consultant, David has advised and worked with companies and organizations across five continents in web analytics and business intelligence, statistical analysis and testing, technology selection and deployment, and online & search marketing. David is the author of Google AdWords Essential Training (Lynda.com, 2011) and Google Website Optimizer Essential Training (Lynda.com, 2010) and served as a technical editor of Performance Marketing with Google Analytics (Wiley, 2010) and Google Analytics Essential Training (Lynda.com, 2011). He is currently working on yet another project to be published in the Spring of 2012, and he teaches a masters level course on web analytics and online marketing at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. As an instructor and speaker, David has keynoted numerous events and has led seminars and sessions focused on digital analytics and search & conversion marketing all around the world for audiences ranging from C-level executives to technical implementation teams. He has been involved in web application development as an engineer and consultant since the late 1990's, beginning his career with Intel Corporation. He was a founder and partner at WebShare, LLC through its merger, and spent two years with the United States Peace Corps developing and deploying websites and web applications to attract grants and international aid for Guatemalan NGOs and local development organizations. David earned his Master of Business Administration in International Management from the Monterey Institute of International Studies and holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.