Speed-Trap enables real-time decision making

Speed-Trap's Real-Time Engine provides marketers with crucial customer data within milliseconds of their arrival online to enable targeted online advertising campaigns.

Using technology previously only considered to be available in the latest sci-fi thriller and through the wonders of Hollywood, online customer insight specialist Speed-Trap has announced the launch of its Real-Time Engine (RTE), which shows retailers exactly what their online customers are doing, right as they are doing it.

As a result RTE enables them to deploy solutions that can instantly and proactively target the customer with appropriate, related marketing at the point of contact.

Speed-Trap's RTE takes a real-time event feed from Speed-Trap's unique Dynamic Collection technology - a complete record of every visitor's experience and actions while on the site - and then applies business rules to provide real-time "session-state" information.

This can be queried via a web-services request by personalisation or decisioning components to make instant decisions on the next content to display or action to take.

This allows personalisation to be not just based on generic or historic information, but on up-to-the-second information directly from the session.

Just six years after Steven Spielberg predicted the technology in his sci-fi Hollywood blockbuster Minority Report set more than 50 years into the future - produced by Twentieth Century-Fox and starring Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell - where interactive advertising addresses individual consumers as they walk past actual billboards, Speed-Trap's technology not only makes the session-state immediately available but can also determine the identity of an online visitor immediately on reaching the site and relate that identity to historical records.

This ability to pre-fetch historic information about the customer's previous journeys through the site and other historical information at the beginning of the session gives real-time personalisation applications instant access to all the necessary information to make an informed decision in milliseconds.

Malcolm Duckett, VP operations and marketing for Speed-Trap, said: "Our technology is the only solution that can combine long-term visitor history, batch-derived scoring and real-time session and interaction data and reliably deliver this to decisioning components in millisecond timeframes under the most severe loads.

"By using our technology, online enterprises can target their online visitors with advertisements specifically designed for that particular person; for example, a traditional personalising "next best offer" system may have identified a number of products that may be of interest to a customer, but the availability of real-time session-state information can allow the system to select the exact offer based on the real-time actions they are taking".

Andy Bober, Global Product Manager, SAS Customer Intelligence, commented: "In working with Speed-Trap we have come to understand the value of their data capture technology, and with the importance of real-time personalisation and targeted marketing today, this new announcement marks a big step forward".

Speed-Trap is a provider of software that uses Web 2.0 technology to capture and deliver complete, real-time data on every individual online customer and prospect, based upon detailed analysis of their current and historic online behaviour and experience, thereby providing complete online customer insight.

The RTE system maintains a "session-state record" for each session on the site, which includes information on the origination of the session and significant business events that have occurred since the visitor arrived.

This allows personalisation and decisioning systems simple access to detailed, real-time information on any session without needing to interface to the site's infrastructure and without needing to maintain their own session-state server or system.

Furthermore, because of its unique behavioural models, the session-state records are business-level events, not just click stream or web hits.

Duckett concluded: "Our new technology allows us to give our clients the opportunity and ability to automatically interact with almost unlimited numbers of their customers simultaneously, but in a structured and focused fashion.

"This approach will dramatically increase the effectiveness of advertising campaigns while also cementing customer loyalty.

"Furthermore, by linking it with our ABI systems and the long-term customer history data it compiles, which we are also launching, we can uniquely provide integrated session-state and customer-state information".

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