Quick Wins with GCP

It seems every company is interested in the cloud these days, and they are increasingly considering Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP offers many benefits for customers, including elastic scalability, world-class big data processing capabilities, paying only for the resources they use, a secure private network, and much more. The most popular workloads (like lift and shift), however, still require a significant amount of work to migrate from their on-premises roots. So many who sign on the dotted line struggle to deliver value quickly.

Instead of getting bogged down with existing enterprise IT workload migration, why not do something that will add incremental value? Every brand with a digital presence today has vast stores of behavioral (a.k.a. clickstream) data. They know that leveraging this data is crucial to competing more effectively — greater customer insight, relevant recommendations, and a consistent experience across channels will improve every business. Until recently, this behavioral data has been difficult to process and consolidate given its volume and complexity (clickstream data can be three to four orders of magnitude bigger and more complex than transaction data!). Today most brands simply dump their raw behavioral data files into their data lake, unable to make use of it.

The cloud changes the game here.

Syntasa’s Google Analytics (GA) 360 and Adobe Analytics Adapters help your organization make quick use of your first-party behavioral data. With Syntasa, you can securely ingest it into your private cloud, stitch it together at the individual level, create aggregations for reporting, join it with your internal customer data, develop and deploy custom AI/ML models to support a number of use cases (like the ones that follow), and activate across all of your channels. All of this happens in an ongoing, automated fashion, with built-in data lineage and documentation.

Building improved digital experiences with first-party behavioral data is a great way to start harnessing the value of GCP. Here are six powerful use cases Syntasa makes possible.

1. Delivering a personalized experience

Many e-commerce brands attempt to implement personalized recommendations, but often these recommendations don’t take individual behavior into account. Instead, businesses base their recommendations on which products are typically purchased together by other customers. Syntasa can help your brand provide more personalized product and content recommendations that will increase sales, deepen engagement, and improve customer experience. Syntasa integrates with your existing technologies so you can deliver personalized recommendations across all of your channels.

When leading multinational consumer electronics retailer Dixons Carphone implemented Syntasa to provide personalized product recommendations for their online customers, three times as many customers added recommended products to their shopping cart. Now when a customer arrives on their website and views a product page, their site queries the Syntasa recommendation API, which then returns personalized bundle recommendations, based on the customer’s history on their website.  

2. Enabling multi-channel algorithmic attribution

Today’s customers interact with multiple online and offline campaigns throughout their purchase journey. Syntasa makes multi-channel attribution possible by bringing together your enterprise and behavioral data within GCP, and enabling you to use AI to develop custom algorithmic attribution models. Multi-channel attribution helps your team understand the relative impact of each customer interaction (both online and offline) on revenue, so you can understand which channels work best for which products, which aspects of your strategy are underperforming, and where to allocate spend for optimal results.  

3. Optimizing ad targeting

Your first-party behavioral data can help you understand which users are most likely to return and convert, which in turn enables you to optimize your retargeting efforts in two ways. First, you can expand audiences that you’ve created with simple rules (like cart abandoners) with lookalike algorithms that are customized for your business. A major electronics manufacturer was able to double their sales by adding more visitors to their audiences while still providing a strong return on their advertising investment. Second, you can score all of your visitors and omit those that are not likely to make a purchase. This can vastly reduce your media spend over time — in one example, PC and smartphone vendor Lenovo used Syntasa to implement algorithmic retargeting that only targeted visitors that were likely to purchase and saved them $5 million annually in display advertising costs.  

4. Flagging fraud

That online fraud has become a costly and challenging problem for companies operating in the digital economy is not news. But there is an incredibly valuable source of signal for detecting fraudulent activity that is not being used – digital behavior. With Syntasa, you can use AI to analyze online behavior to identify and address fraudulent activity. You can also create specialized experiences for visitors that show the potential for fraud. Customized AI/ML models are much more effective, flexible, and scalable than rules-based models in combating sophisticated fraud.

5. Reducing churn

Predicting customer churn is a critical part of any subscription business. Acquiring new customers is expensive, so anything that can help retain more of them and improve lifetime value will go straight to the bottom line and significantly improve business results. Today most companies are limited to using their internal enterprise transaction data to predict which customers are likely to leave. Including additional data that represents how your customers behave online yields additional signal that allows you to more accurately predict who is likely to churn before it happens. Then you can activate proactive campaigns to intervene and improve retention.

6. Stitching together a unified customer profile

Identity graphs help brands provide better offers and improve customer experience by gaining a fuller picture of their customers. Syntasa’s platform has the ability to ingest data from marketing technology systems, including Adobe, Google, and others. It validates the data and uses its Identity Graph to synthesizes the data into a single view for each individual. Digital teams gain visibility into an individual’s behavior, including impressions, clicks, sessions, views, events, purchases, subscriptions, and cancellations.

This was precisely what a UK-based global news organization did as they stitched together disparate sources of behavior from three different digital platforms with Syntasa’s ID Graph. They now have the ability to view when a user first appeared on their website, app, or news reader, and all of the actions taken on any one of their platforms.

Ensuring you have a handle on your company’s behavioral data is the first step to finding value from your GCP environment. Syntasa can help. Try a free trial today.

Syntasa will also be coming to GCP Marketplace in February 2020. Stay tuned!