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Frequently Asked Questions
 Q. When was I-Impact founded and where does it fit in the Internet market?
A. I-Impact was formed in 1998. The company began by developing e-business websites. As I-Impact began to deliver these websites, our customers wanted to know more about the economic performance of those sites. From that need for performance measurement evolved the development of sophisticated tools. The Internet analytics product developed was MarketDrive™ software.
Q. What is MarketDrive?
A. MarketDrive is impact analysis software that enables commercial e-businesses to identify, evaluate, and optimize the economic performance of their sites. MarketDrive consists of a set of tools that use state-of-the-art econometric causal modeling that focuses on increasing sales and profitability.
Q. How can MarketDrive predict the future outcomes of Internet e-business and marketing activities?
A. MarketDrive collects data from multiple sources, including SQL databases, OLAP servers, log files, financial data, HTML pages, and a variety of other files. This data is processed to create a predictive cause-and-effect model.
Using this model, as well as other calculated results, the software can support a complete "what-if" analysis. MarketDrive uses various proprietary, sophisticated statistical modeling technologies, combined with economic soft modeling theory and technology. This combination with agent and web technologies enables the full-scale, cost-effective deployment of an Internet-based, e-business decision-support system.
Q. Finding answers to the following questions is important to the success of my e-business. Can MarketDrive help?
- Are marketing dollars being well spent?
- Could results be better?
- Are there alternative and effective ways to spend the marketing budget?
- How can we better cater to the needs of our customers?
- How can we retain our best customers?
- How can we avoid customer "churn/turnover"?
- Is there a way to better manage our e-business so we can be profitable for all lines of our product or service?
A. MarketDrive helps you find the answers to the questions above and assists in the challenging tasks of managing an e-business and accurately forecasting economic performance. This software comes to the aid of e-business managers who previously have had to rely on gut feelings, intuition, generic market studies, and other less scientific methodologies.
Q. What does MarketDrive deliver that other products and services in this market do not?
A. Although most web-traffic reporting and e-business software has basic reporting capabilities, it mainly uses simplistic tools and lacks predictive and analytic capabilities. Typically, reports describe historical activities such as traffic. MarketDrive is an analytical tool that permits e-business management to draw supported conclusions and make proactive decisions based on sophisticated analysis. The ability to make these decisions provides web management with a competitive advantage, leading to increased revenues and higher profits.
Q. What is "economic performance" and why is it important?
A. Economic performance is of utmost importance to any commercial business. It reflects sales, profits, market share, value of customer, affiliate marketing, return on investment, retention rate, conversion rate, and other economic measures. The economic factors of an e-business are different than traffic-related parameters, which measure hits, clicks, and "clicks-throughs." Improving economic performance will help a business sustain growth, increase in value, and succeed in the long run.
Q. MarketDrive uses the terms goals and drivers. Exactly what do they mean?
A. Sales, profits, market share, value of customer, affiliate marketing, return on investment, retention rate, conversion rate, and other economic measures are business goals, which are influenced by a company’s actions. As examples, a company invests, markets, promotes, and advertises. These are considered business drivers—the tools at the disposal of a business to help achieve corporate goals. Since every business is different, business goals and drivers differ too. Goals often change over time. Because of the nature of business on the Internet, the goals of e-businesses do change constantly and continuously.
MarketDrive uncovers the relationship between business goals and business drivers. It also helps determine the impact that drivers have on goals. And it can identify the changes when they happen, so your business can be ready to make necessary adjustments in real time.
Q. What new information can my company obtain with MarketDrive?
A. MarketDrive helps you identify and quantify forces that drive the economic performance of websites. It does so by:
- Providing decision-support information for achieving organizational objectives.
- Establishing and managing financial return expectations for the e-business operation.
- Assisting in forecasting, planning, and budgeting e-commerce web site activity.
- Helping to evaluate marketing campaigns and improve them over time.
- Benchmarking actual results against forecasts, to optimize resource allocation on an ongoing basis.
- Monitoring ongoing website behavioral patterns to identify significant market trends and changes well in advance.
MarketDrive allows you to take a proactive approach to resource allocation, system optimization, and forecasting. It introduces space website measurability, predictability, and accountability into the Internet environment, leading to increased revenues and profits.
Q. Will MarketDrive have a negative performance impact on my system?
A. The MarketDrive server is a server-side Java-based server application. It runs on its own dedicated Windows NT Server. As a separate machine, it does not affect main e-business system performance.
Q. Will I need to install new software on my desktop to use MarketDrive?
A. MarketDrive communicates with the world via software agents and an HTML/Java-based browser user interface. You can access the MarketDrive server from any web browser, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer running on Windows98 or WindowsNT.
Q. How long will it take before MarketDrive starts to provide results?
A. Unlike other solutions, MarketDrive can provide results almost immediately. The majority of our customers experience the benefits of MarketDrive within a few weeks of installation.
Q. How is MarketDrive software delivered?
A. MarketDrive is delivered either as a product or as a hosted application service with a monthly, per-user subscription. In this way, I-Impact customers have the flexibility to either buy and support the application in-house or rent the software while outsourcing its associated infrastructure.
Q. How can my company get more information about I-Impact and MarketDrive?
A. Send a message to info@i-impact.com, or call us at 877-766-8899 (toll free in the United States and Canada) or +1 (415) 402-0240.
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