NEW WEB-ENABLED CLEMENTINE DATA MINING WORKBENCH

The volumes of data collected online are full of valuable information that can help organizations improve personalization, create selling opportunities and, ultimately, lead to more profitable relationships with customers. Web mining products from SPSS Inc that reveal this information are helping companies gain a more complete understanding of online customers and their behavior, giving them a competitive edge and a stronger bottom line. Jubii, Denmark's largest Web portal, has seen ad click-through rates jump by as much as 50 percent as a result of implementing SPSS Web mining tools. Other organizations including Web analysis firms Raydium Inc and Buystream have expanded the services they offer their clients with SPSS Web mining technology.

Jubii is the most visited Web portal in Denmark, seeing more than 2 million visitors in a typical month. In addition to traditional portal offerings such as news and entertainment channels, a search engine and shopping, Jubii sees specialized content as one of the foundations of its future success.

"We don't want our users to think of Jubii only as an online presence," said Kasper Larsen, sales manager and Jubii co-founder. "We want them to associate Jubii with rewarding events and services both on the Web and in other aspects of their lives. The key to making this association is identifying who our visitors are and finding out what they want. Once this information is available to us, we can put it into practice by offering the right things--targeted news reports, in-depth community information, customized event announcements--to the right people.

"Of course, we also must survive as a business. We don't charge users for our services; our revenue comes from banner ads, sponsorships, event fees and newsletter advertising. All of which, of course, also benefit from knowing who is visiting our portal and what they are interested in."

Jubii is achieving a high level of personalization with the help of Clementine, SPSS' data mining workbench, and SPSS Consulting Services. Larsen launched a massive customer profiling project in November 2000. Beginning with a relatively small number of loyal users, the project assigned profiles to each of them based on the pages they viewed and the time of day they visited. These profiles, which are updated upon each new visit, are then fed into data models that determine which banner ad is most appropriate for the visitor. The initial project was so successful--ad click-through rates increased by 30 to 50 percent--that it has recently been expanded to cover the entire portal.

"Without Clementine and SPSS' consulting expertise, there's no way we could have achieved these results as quickly or as easily," said Larsen.

Clementine users build a map of their data mining project--called a "stream"--by selecting icons that represent steps in the data mining process. To help ensure a successful and productive data mining project, Clementine includes application templates--collections of streams, sample data and documentation commonly used in specific applications. Clementine 6.0 is the first version to offer a Web mining application template.

A company that is providing Web analysis to online businesses is also using Clementine to drive its success. Raydium Inc, a Chicago-based company that improves Web site usability through research into online behavior, balances its clients' desire for customer information with the privacy concerns of users.

"We seek to provide our clients with the most complete and accurate picture of their customers possible," said Jordan Ho, vice president of operations. "However, we realize that privacy is one of the most contentious issues facing the online world today. By making the protection of individual information one of the platforms of our solutions, we can ease visitors' anxiety while still providing the valuable demographic information our clients need to succeed."

Raydium's Desktop Strategy platform collects user data which can then be analyzed by its Customer Behavioral Intelligence solution. Starting in December 2000, Raydium incorporated Clementine and Capri into its Customer Behavioral Intelligence solution to mine the data it collects. Capri, a sequence association algorithm available as an add-on to Clementine, analyzes clickstream data to discover what path a visitor takes to a particular Web page. Once this information is uncovered, Raydium's User Interaction Services can take it into account when redesigning a Web site to improve usability.

"The addition of these Web mining tools from SPSS means that our ability to effectively analyze visitor behavior while maintaining their anonymity is stronger than ever," said Ho.

Buystream, a Web intelligence company headquartered in Ottawa, provides analysis and reporting solutions to help firms manage their online business by "measuring what matters." To Web retailers, one key segment served by Buystream, "what matters" are things like which campaigns attract the most profitable visitors, what content customers look at once they visit and which problems stand in the way of successful sales.

Buystream's analysis and reporting solution for e-retailers, Buystream Merchant, measures and analyzes key e-business events--such as visit-to-buy ratios--that reflect online behavior and impact sales. Approximately one-third of their clients, however, require information that goes beyond the standard reports. This is where Buystream's use of SPSS Base to mine Web data comes in.

"When clients have specific questions to be answered--for example, 'Will a new graphics-enhancing feature on my Web site increase sales?'--our research team may find it necessary to do some highly specialized, in-depth analysis for them," said Darryl Somers, senior research consultant. "This often means combining results from our software with other sources of information, which can result in massive amounts of data.

"We selected SPSS Base for these customized tasks because it easily handles these enormous datasets and offers a suite of products which work together seamlessly. Our research team has been so successful with these individualized studies that they now generate 35 percent of Buystream's total revenues."

About Clementine

Clementine, SPSS' enterprise-strength data mining workbench, helps businesses improve the profitability of customer relationships through in-depth understanding of data. Organizations use the insight gained from Clementine to retain profitable customers, identify up- and cross-selling opportunities, attract new customers, detect fraud, reduce risk and improve government service delivery. Clementine can help businesses better understand their customers' online behavior and, as a result, improve Web site design, increase e-store sales and deliver online services more effectively.

Clementine combines two valuable assets--data and business knowledge--to create powerful predictive models which answer real business questions such as "What customers are in danger of leaving?" or "Who is a safe credit risk?" At each point of the data mining process, Clementine's visual interface invites users' specific business expertise. Clementine's many modeling techniques, such as prediction, classification, segmentation and association detection, lead to the most powerful, accurate model or combination of models, producing superior results. Once models are created, Clementine Solution Publisher enables their delivery enterprise-wide to decision makers or a database.

Clementine was the first data mining workbench aimed at business users and is consistently acknowledged by users and analysts as the leading visual rapid modeling environment for data mining. Clementine has established a leading position in the data mining market and is used in a wide range of industries including e-commerce, telecommunications, finance, retail, health care, government and higher education. More than 500 organizations worldwide use Clementine including British Telecommunications, Unilever, Provident Financial, Raydium and e-Dialog.

About SPSS Inc

SPSS Inc. enables organizations to develop more profitable customer relationships by providing analytical solutions that discover what customers want and predict what they will do. The company delivers analytical solutions at the intersection of customer relationship management and business intelligence. SPSS analytical solutions integrate and analyze market, customer and operational data in key vertical markets worldwide including: telecommunications, health care, banking, finance, insurance, manufacturing, retail, consumer packaged goods, market research and the public sector.

Headquartered in Chicago, SPSS has more than 40 offices, over 1,300 employees and 2000 pro forma revenues of $198 million. The company also has received the following honors: No. 77 on Forbes 2000 list of the "200 Best Small Companies" and No. 12 on the 2000 DM Review 100; placed No. 16 on the 2000 Softletter 100, a ranking of the top 100 personal computer software companies in the United States; and No. 115 in the 2000 Software 500, a ranking of the world's largest software vendors by Software Magazine; listed on Working Mother magazine's "100 Best Companies for Working Mothers" for 2000. For more information, visit www.spss.com.

Contact SPSS, Susan Kalell, 800-525-4980, pr@spss.com.