July 20, 2011

When the baby Kal-El, after emerging from his crashed space craft, lifted up a car and tossed it from his path we knew he had a lot of potential.  At that point, though, we didn’t know just how often he would save the human race from utter annihilation (and if you’re wondering who Kal-El is, you may know him better by his other name).

That’s the way some clients feel today toward our new research offering Lightspeed Radius. Radius fuses our online panelists’ survey and profile data with their observed online behaviours and provides unprecedented insights.  When I talk to clients about it, they are impressed with its potential – and rightly so – but they aren’t quite sure how it can help them.

By observing panelists’ online behaviours through clickstream analysis, clients can track specifically how consumers search for products, how much time they spend on particular web pages, which keywords they search, which other products they research and much more.  Pairing this information with survey data provides insight into consumers’ perceptions and intentions, as well as the motivations behind these behaviours.  Hence, we have a comprehensive view of what the consumers intend to do and what they actually do.  So now what?

While it doesn’t help them leap tall buildings in a single bound, Radius does help brands take a huge leap through segmentation.  For the first time, brands can track the online behaviours of the proprietary consumer segments in which they have already invested and are already comfortable with.  For example, say a personal care brand has identified, through survey research, a segment of women who put a lot of effort into caring for their skin.  The brand can track the online behaviours of this segment to find out every website its members visit to research skin care products, which pages hold their attention, which ads they respond to and more.  This works the other way round, too.  A brand can identify a group that exhibits certain online behaviours, like visiting several similar web sites in a defined period of time, and can survey that group to further identify and define a particular segment.  For example, an automotive brand may find a group that visits edmunds.com, consumerreports.com and carsdirect.com within one week, and may go back to survey that group to find additional characteristics its members share.  There are numerous implications for ad placement, as well as co- and cross-marketing opportunities.

Radius has other superpowers, including the ability to analyze trends to help identify the reasons behind changing online shopping behaviours, to uncover and compare relationships between brand equity measures and online brand interactions and follow how they change over time.

Of course, Lightspeed Research works very hard to ensure that the data collection is done strictly through a multi-stage opt-in process.  Furthermore, the clickstream data is tied to survey data but anonymized and cleaned of potentially sensitive information in compliance with local regulations and a robust privacy policy.

For brands who want to derive powerful insights through the integration of consumer survey data with observed online behaviors, Lightspeed Radius provides a super solution.

Category:Integrated Data, Research Products
Posted on July 20, 2011



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