MarketDrive Overview

Comprehensive Decision Support for e-Business

MarketDrive™ software from I-Impact is an advanced decision processing solution that enables you to improve the economic performance of your e-business. By closely analyzing the many interrelated factors influencing your business performance, MarketDrive provides you with a powerful predictive capability that results in better decision-making and increased revenue and profitability.

Whether your company offers goods or services, MarketDrive enables your e-business executives and managers to rapidly understand the factors that impact the economic performance of your web sites. It gathers data from site-related databases and other sources, and then analyzes it using sophisticated statistical and econometric models that can gauge the true effectiveness of product, marketing, sales, and customer-related decisions.

With MarketDrive, you can develop a comprehensive cause-and-effect picture of your business’s performance. For example, you can identify the causes of customer turnover, subscription retention, and banner-ad success, and understand how these factors affect revenue and ROI. Through the use of proprietary analytics, MarketDrive also has the unique ability to predict the impact of future decisions, thereby helping e-business sites attain profitability more rapidly. And because MarketDrive is easy to implement and use, you can start gathering and using crucial data almost immediately.

Key benefits

• Improves understanding of the factors driving the economic performance of your web business
• Provides detailed comparisons of the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns and other site-related activities
• Delivers accurate forecasts built on specified results, assumptions, and allocated resources
• Monitors and benchmarks web-site use to help e-business managers spot changes in real time and stay on track toward their goals
• Can be implemented rapidly and easily in a matter of weeks, with little involvement from your technical staff
• Offers the e-business manager easy access through a standard web browser
  

About MarketDrive
Is your web business really succeeding? Or is information you don’t have or understand undermining your success before you realize what’s happening?

Finding out what’s really going on with your e-business web sites requires accurate measurements of the impact of your strategic and tactical decisions. Yet until now, even the most sophisticated e-business analysis solutions have not been able to provide that information. Nor have they been able to accurately predict the results of prospective decisions, such as marketing campaigns and other site-boosting activities.

To truly gauge the effectiveness of your current activities and predict the effectiveness of future decisions, you need relevant and valuable information gleaned from solutions designed expressly for e-businesses. Solutions that can perform sophisticated analyses on multiple databases simultaneously to uncover the impact of hidden relationships. Solutions that let you easily interact with data to detect crucial trends. Solutions that provide comprehensive, understandable reports.

Those powerful capabilities are now yours with MarketDrive software from I-Impact, Inc., a leader in software technology and services for identifying, evaluating, and optimizing the economic performance of e-businesses. MarketDrive can delve deep into your organization’s data sources such as, site-traffic, transaction, affiliate/partner, merchant, and advertising. It can help you see causes and effects clearly, so you can make better decisions about your web site. And it can help you readily convey your findings to partners and other team members. In short, MarketDrive is a comprehensive decision support solution for e-businesses.

"MarketDrive helps us more tightly manage our marketing funds to yield a higher conversion rate and a higher adoption rate. We've seen a significant increase in the effectiveness of our online sales and marketing campaigns. We expect our net profit to be 5 to 7 percent higher than it would be without MarketDrive." —Red Gorilla

Powerful MarketDrive tools
MarketDrive software consists of three major components:

1. The E-business Data Hub™ gathers and stores data from multiple sources.
2. The Impact Analyzer™ models the activities that affect your site’s financial success.
3. The Impact Reporter™ summarizes vital information and analysis results in text and graphics.

MarketDrive takes advantage of several industry-leading technologies, including ETL, OLAP, and Java servlets. MarketDrive is an open, extensible, customizable, and scalable cross-platform solution that can be used with a combination of third-party software, operating systems, databases, and web servers.

E-business Data Hub
E-businesses are often complex enterprises with information resources spread across multiple branches, partnerships, and affiliates. As a result, your critical data is dispersed throughout diverse applications, each serving different needs of the enterprise—and each having its own proprietary format.

The MarketDrive E-business Data Hub collects and holds data from a wide variety of sources to provide you with a comprehensive view of your e-business. Sources can include existing log files; customer, affiliate, and advertising databases; financial data; customer relationship management (CRM) systems; and traffic analyzers. You can browse through the Data Hub using OLAP techniques to drill down into specific data or perform ad hoc queries.

Impact Analyzer
The core of MarketDrive is the Impact Analyzer, which can discover vital cause-and-effect relationships within your e-business. The Impact Analyzer uses the concept of conditional expectations to develop prediction-oriented cause-and-effect models.

Using a graphical interface, you can view data from any sources you like, then run sophisticated statistical analyses and see the results in easy-to-understand charts. For instance, you could immediately see how different promotions are performing across different affiliate partners for a particular marketing campaign, and understand the impact on revenue and profitability at the campaign level or at the individual promotion level. Impact Analyzer also enables you to predict the effects of future campaigns you’re considering.

"MarketDrive is helping us define where to spend our marketing dollars. Our marketing budgets are sometimes only 10 percent of our competitors’ budgets, yet our traffic and sales may be 50 percent of theirs. As an example, after running promotions with some radio stations around the country, MarketDrive let us understand how much these new customers were buying, whether they were coming back repeatedly to the site, and whether we were making or losing money on each promotion."—GourmetMarket.com

Impact Reporter
With the Impact Reporter, you can generate and view customized reports instantly. Interactive reporting lets you create reports on the fly using live data from the E-business Data Hub. Using a standard web browser, executives can control their e-businesses with a real-time display of the key performance indicators. Additionally, a flexible architecture enables Impact Reporter to use data gathered from multiple data structures such as OLAP servers and SQL databases.

The MarketDrive advantage
MarketDrive software is ready to help you drive your web site to commercial success. Start using it right away to uncover the hidden factors affecting the success of your e-business site and to help you choose the future activities that will maximize your site’s profitability.

MarketDrive is available as either a standalone product or a hosted application. I-Impact will also offer customized MarketDrive solutions for vertical markets such as retail, subscription-based, financial services, and portal sites.

For more information
To find out more about how MarketDrive can help your company maximize the value of its e-business, contact us.