Are You Effectively Marketing Your Product?Do you Know How to Tell?

Business Intelligence for the Micro-ISV

Frank S. RiettaFrank S. Rietta

Bus. Intelligence:

Programmer or Marketer?

• Try-before-you-buy software online• Identify your target

• Consumer or Business?

• Technical or Beginner?• On Google’s first page• Press coverage• Download sites

Are You Effectively Marketing Your Product?

What Questions Would You Ask?

Bus. Intelligence:

Agenda: The BI Process

1. Why Business Intelligence?

2. Patterns in Data

3. Mind Your Ratios

4. Discovery Process

5. Spreadsheet

Bus. Intelligence:

Why Business Intelligence?

• Highly competitive and connected markets

• Drowning in data

• Turn that data into actionable information

It’s a competitive advantageIt’s the difference between survival and failure

1

Bus. Intelligence:

Patterns in Data: Download Volume

Quarters 1 Jun 2003 – 31 Dec 2005

Tot

al D

ownl

oads

2

Data from the website logs for rietta.com

Bus. Intelligence:

Patterns in Data: Sales

Total Revenue by Quarter

$ 0.00

$ 200.00

$ 400.00

$ 600.00

$ 800.00

$ 1,000.00

$ 1,200.00

$ 1,400.00

Q 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Quarter

Re

ven

ue

fro

m S

oftw

are

S

ale

s

2

Data from the payment processor logs for rietta.com

Bus. Intelligence:

Sources of Data

• Raw web site logs• Analyzed web site logs• Payment processor logs• Databases

2

Bus. Intelligence:

Mind Your Ratios

Conversions

3

Bus. Intelligence:

Trial Conversion Ratio

• The Program Has a Broken installer• It Crashes• It is Cracked• It is Falsely Identified as Malware

3

Purchases

Total Downloads

Bus. Intelligence:

The Discovery Process

1. Identify Information that is needed

2. Find Sources of Data to be converted into that info

3. Perform Data Analysis to understand the raw data

4. Build an ETL process to gather & cleanse raw data

5. Build a Decision Support System, which can be a spreadsheet

4

Bus. Intelligence:

Have You Ever Used This Menu?

5

Bus. Intelligence:

Collecting Data into a Spreadsheet

• Make a worksheet for each data source• Add a Quarter column to serve as the

correlation/pivot point for the data

• =IN T ( (M O N TH (B2) + 2) / 3 ) + ( (YE A R (B2) - 2003) * 4 )

• Repeat for other data sources• Create a Pivot Table from the data

sources

5

Bus. Intelligence:

One Worksheet Per Data Source

Quarter Batch Date Hits Traffic Last Download Date File Program Type1 20-Jan-03 303 0.31% 30-Jan-03 /menusnap/mnusnp15.zip MenuSnap FW1 20-Jan-03 169 5.30% 30-Jan-03 /downloads/robogen/robogen152.zip RoboGen SW1 20-Jan-03 20 0.01% 30-Jan-03 /downloads/robogen/RoboTag.zip RoboGen SW2 20-Apr-03 251 0.19% 29-Apr-03 /menusnap/mnusnp15.zip MenuSnap FW2 20-Apr-03 143 4.12% 29-Apr-03 /downloads/robogen/robogen152.zip RoboGen SW2 20-Apr-03 1610 62.77% 30-Apr-03 /downloads/whoisweb_setup.exe WhoisWeb SW5 20-Feb-04 30 0.01% 28-Feb-04 /downloads/robogen/RoboTag.zip RoboGen SW5 20-Feb-04 3228 66.56% 29-Feb-04 /downloads/whoisweb_setup.exe WhoisWeb SW5 20-Feb-04 69 0.63% 26-Feb-04 /downloads/whoisweb_setup.exe WhoisWeb SW

5

Aggregate Data from Text File Import

Derived field on which to pivot

Bus. Intelligence:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

MenuSnap

RoboGen

SQLConverter0

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

70000

80000

90000

MenuSnap

PDM

RoboGen

Speedar

SQLConverter

WhoisWeb

Drop Page Fields Here

Sum of Hits

Quarter

Program

Pivot Graph

5

Bus. Intelligence:

One Last Thing

6

Bus. Intelligence:

Questions?

More details in the paper, also called“Business Intelligence for the Micro-ISV”

Bus. Intelligence:

Leadership is W.A.R.

• Working on the right problem. • Asking the right questions. • Removing barriers that impede

progress toward the ultimate goal.

- Herman Cain on his Radio Show (circa March 2006)

Bus. Intelligence:

Further Reading

1. B. Drolias. Shareware marketing e-metrics. http://www.shareware-marketing.net/shareware_marketing_e-metrics.html, 2003.

2. E. F. Ian H. Witten. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, Second Edition. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 2005.

3. L. T. Moss and S. Atre. Business Intelligence Roadmap: The Complete Project Lifecycle for Decision-Support Applications.

4. F. S. Rietta. Business analysis of web application information. http://www.rietta.com/whitepapers/mysql_webapps_excel.html, 2005.

5. C. Z. S. Christian Albright, Wayne L. Winston. Data Analysis and Decision Making: With Microsoft Excel. Thomas South-Western, Mason, OH, 2006.

Bus. Intelligence:

Further Reading: General

Bus. Intelligence:

Further Reading: Technical