Genealogy
Now in it's 3rd major release, VITES™ started in 2001 as a proper end-to-end tracking system, built when a client was trying to understand where his online marketing spend was going. The original system was just called End-to-End Tracker and worked by stamping the visitors PC with a unique code and their source when they arrived at the site for the first time, and then spewing this information out whenever the visitor sent information to the client.
It was amazing and proved the 80:20 rule, showing that 80% of the advertising spend was pretty poor. Not surprisingly our client was over the moon and the business exploded when they invested in the right online advertising and had faith in the value of it as they were able to measure the real return on investment for themselves.
VITES™ 1.0
Born in the middle of 2003, this was the first time we linked the data recording to the delivery. It was clear that first time visitors to a website needed to be encouraged to return to generate revenue, and that returning visitors to the website needed to be treated differently to first timers. So a simple "tunnelling system" was implemented that established where the visitor was in the sales cycle by understanding their previous activity on the website and also by interrogating the offline CRM system.
By doing this, VITES™ dropped people into the most appropriate tunnel and fed them tunnel specific content, imagery and, most importantly, applications.
Conversion rates rocketed. We had stumbled across a killer application for the web. In much the same way as Sergey Brin devised a method at Stanford University to "rank" sites in importance based on inbound links - which then became the basis for Google - we stumbled upon the link between recording and behaviour and predictive purchasing was born.