Analyzing Marketing Automation data such as Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot to identify the combined impact of marketing campaigns in sequence.Combing through weblog data such as Google Analytics, to understand the paths taken by visitors among the pages or actions on a web property, to optimize their experience and drive them towards a favored outcome, such as purchasing in e-commerce.Now, unlike biology where sequencing applies to strings of nucleic acids, sequencing in marketing implies trying to identify trends within large amounts of transactions, using reference time/date stamps.

For instance, in most research scenarios, a customer who purchased a music album on iTunes after watching a video of the artist on YouTube, should be segmented differently than the one who purchased that same album and then proceeded to watch the same YouTube video: the sequence reveals most certainly a different causality between those actions. Since a lot of Marketing analytics revolve around the understanding of customer behavior, it only seems logical that the sequence of the observed behavior comes to prominence. Sequence Analysis techniques and concepts originate from biology research, but they are actually very relevant in the field I am more familiar with: Marketing.

I’m introducing a different type of post this week: still a tips and tricks style of post, but it stands against additional business context than usual, to be more relevant and applicable.

Time sequence analysis