Tim Evans is the Head of Product Management at VisualDNA. Here he discusses the VisualDNA offering, daily deal personalisation, and user privacy.

Can you give an overview of the VisualDNA offering in the European market?

TE: We make it easy for a user to create a digital persona that describes the many facets of their real self and take this persona with them wherever they go online. Publishers can personalize their content, retailers can deliver improved product recommendations, advertisers can deliver more relevant ads as a result.

88% of users who start go on to complete our visual quizzes and we can infer personas for other users based on their online behaviour. The quality of data we collect through our quiz is exceptionally high enabling us to achieve return on ad spend improvements of as much as 980% for e-commerce advertisers. We work with publishers to help users create their profiles and get a personalized experience on the publisher's site and with advertisers to help them reach their desired audiences.

Recently we've been working with daily deal sites to help them personalize their daily emails, and make them more relevant to their users.

VisualDNA collects much of its data from personality tests. What percentage of a website audience needs to carry out the personality quiz before you can infer the total audience based on the data you’ve collected?

TE: We only need about 1 to 2% of a website's audience to take the VisualDNA quiz, which is easily achievable. This gives us enough data to then be able to extrapolate the data to the total audience. Publishers just need to embed the VisualDNA audience analytics tag along-side Google Analytics, and our sophisticated inference algorithms kick in to infer the remainder of the site's audience.

Are you a pure data play or do you also buy media for advertisers?

TE: Yes we're mainly a data play, trading our data on platforms like Invite Media, AppNexus, DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We do occasionally buy media for advertisers when needed, using platforms like the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to do so. We don't wish to compete with media agencies.

Can you explain how you segment audiences and how this data can be leveraged by publishers and third parties?

TE: We package up our audience data in the Audience Brochure, an easy-to-navigate interface which groups our hundreds of audience segments into 13 main life areas. Publishers use easily this data to allow them to make informed decisions about the kind of content to create or buy, and how their readership is changing over time.

Can your data be used in real-time buys? Are you integrated with SSPs and DSPs?

TE: Yes, our anonymous data is fully integrated into the main SSPs and DSPs, such as Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange v2, Invite Media and AppNexus.

VisualDNA is working with daily deal providers. Can you explain more about this relationship – and how these providers use VisualDNA’s technology in targeting the right deals to users?

Daily Deal sites are on the rise, and today they usually work by emailing the same deals to all users in a certain geographic area, e.g. East London. VisualDNA allows deal sites to personalise these emails, prioritising the deals that are most likely to be of interest, based on the user's VisualDNA. Over time, our inference algorithm gets better at predicting the deals based on CTR, and what users like them, like. Users can easily click and see which deals they would have been sent if their VisualDNA wasn't being used.

How will your analytics and visualisation tools give the daily deal specialists gain better insights into their audience and customer base?

TE: Our analytics and visualisation allows daily deal providers to see in real-time which audience segments are responding to which campaigns, and use this to fine-tune the kinds of deals they offer to maximise uptake. Deal providers can only work with a certain number of businesses due to the way the distribution system works, and VisualDNA insights can be used to help prioritise the deals people want the most.

Will the new privacy directive have an effect on your business within the EU?

TE: At VisualDNA, we've always taken user privacy very seriously and put the user's interests first. The great thing about VisualDNA is that it puts users in control of their data and allow them to get more relevant content and advertising as a result.

Users who take our quizzes are aware that they are providing data, and can visit my.visualdna.com at any time to edit or delete their data. Our vision is that all users will want to create a VisualDNA profile so that they can get a better, more personalized experience wherever they go on the web, with them being fully in charge of this personalisation.