On-line marketing spend is rapidly growing and relatively poorly understood when compared to many of the traditional marketing channels. On-line marketing has characteristics that are similar to both indirect (e.g. television, radio) and direct (e.g. catalog) marketing. The ability to track Web visits through “cookies” all the way through a purchase is analogous to a catalog marketer’s use of source codes to trace orders back to specific catalog versions. However, the concept of ad impressions that are viewed by an untracked audience is similar to television audiences viewing a commercial. The unique nature of on-line marketing and the available data sources leads to a need for unique applications for managing and optimizing the spend. This talk will present the results from three live tests of the use of data mining and constraint-based optimization to improve the business results for paid search, one of the major areas of online marketing. The case studies will cover a large US retail bank, a large US e-commerce site, and a US real estate lead aggregator.

Robert Cooley holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. Currently, Dr. Cooley is the Chief Technology Officer for OptiMine Software, which specializes in analytic applications for on-line marketing. Prior to OptiMine, Dr. Cooley was a VP of Technical Operations for KXEN Inc., a data mining software company. Dr. Cooley is known for his groundbreaking work in Web Mining and has over a decade of experience applying data mining to business problems. He has published numerous papers on the topics of CRM Mining, Web Usage Mining, and Text Mining.