Eric J. Hansen

Company: SiteSpect, Inc.

Eric Hansen founded SiteSpect in 2004 and is the chief architect of the firm's non-intrusive technology for multivariate testing, behavioral targeting, and mobile optimization. Prior to SiteSpect, Eric founded and was CEO of Worldmachine Technologies, a web development and consulting firm specializing in large-scale engineering projects for organizations such as John Hancock Insurance, Putnam Investments, Hearst New Media, and The New England Journal of Medicine. He also held product management and software engineering positions at several Boston-based technology firms. In addition to being a frequent speaker at conferences covering web analytics and optimization, Eric writes regularly about the intersection of marketing and technology. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Cognitive Science and Psychology with honors from the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY.

Tell us about your background and your role in the company.
As founder and CEO of SiteSpect, I oversee corporate strategy, research & development, and marketing, with an overarching vision to deliver innovative, easy-to-adopt products and services for the optimization of digital marketing.  Our mission is two-fold: to provide best-in-class products, and do so with service and support that is unsurpassed in the industry. And, in fact, everything we do is in support of this mission, whether it’s creating new features based on customer needs, or exploring ways to measure and optimize the end-user experience in emerging marketing channels. I really enjoy interacting with our customers on a regular basis and am inspired by their ongoing success with SiteSpect.

What are your main services?
SiteSpect enables web marketers to optimize website and mobile web effectiveness through multivariate testing and behavioral targeting. By testing variations of landing pages, product descriptions, search results, and buy-flows, SiteSpect allows marketers to fine-tune every aspect of their website on a segment-by-segment basis. As the first and only non-intrusive solution available, SiteSpect empowers marketers to optimize their sites without the need for ongoing IT involvement. SiteSpect's patent-pending technology is used by some of the world's largest and most successful online businesses, including Overstock.com, VEGAS.com, The New York Times, Staples, JC Penney, MTV Networks, and many more.

What makes your firm different from other companies competing in your industry?
There are many ways that we’re different from other companies in the testing and behavioral targeting space, but the thing that people most often recognize us for is our non-intrusive approach to optimization. In a nutshell, this means that we’re able to perform all the functions for testing, targeting, and tracking behavior, without making any changes to the underlying site. Unlike the alternatives, SiteSpect does not require any changes to HTML or programming code. We are the only vendor who can truly claim to eliminate the need for ongoing IT support.  The end benefit? Marketers using SiteSpect can focus their efforts on achieving their optimization goals, while saving precious time, money, and resources.

Tell us more about your firm’s success story.
We launched in 2004 with several pilot clients, and through testing and targeting we were able to provide significant improvements to conversion, engagement and lead generation rates. At that time, we had a small staff and limited budget, but we knew we were on to a good idea and that really motivated us to grow the business. Today, we employ dozens of people and work with around 100 customers, including a large number of the world’s most notable and successful online businesses. To date it’s been quite an exhilarating trip. Even though economic conditions are challenging right now, we believe optimization is a dark horse that is really starting to shine. Now, more than ever, marketers and their CFOs are focused on “doing better with what they have” – which, in a word, means optimization. We continue to see tremendous growth and opportunity, not only in the current climate, but in the years to come.

According to you, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a company before choosing a vendor like you?
There are many questions that marketers can and should ask, but some of the key questions include:

•    How long does it take to set up and launch a test or targeting campaign? Can it be done in minutes, or does it take days or weeks?
•    Can tests be created, launched, and analyzed without any involvement from IT staff or website development resources?
•    Can the solution test any and all content, both static and dynamic?
•    Can it track all visitor behavior without the need for tagging?
•    Can it easily send and receive data from third-party solutions like web analytics or CRM systems?
•    Are there any end-user or browser requirements that would preclude testing on, say, mobile devices?


How do you develop your own skills in this continuously changing environment?
I’m interested in where digital communication is headed, and both the emergence and convergence of marketing technologies. For example, testing social media efforts, mobile content targeting, and tracking visitor behavior across channels. As the number of channels available to marketers continues to divide and expand (and budgets continue to shift from offline to online), the need for integrating data across channels, micro-segmentation, and targeted testing only increases.

What do you see as the future of the industry? What will be the challenges? Do you anticipate any drastic changes?
We are seeing the emergence of free or low-cost solutions that help get marketers started with basic analytics and optimization. From there, folks like SiteSpect provide the high-octane capabilities that offer significantly more power, ease of use, and automation.  And we’re hearing more and more that marketers have outgrown their low-cost solutions and are looking for sophistication and ways to leverage an ever-increasing breadth and depth of data. To that end, we believe there’s an evolution towards adopting more automated optimization for certain things (where machines make, or at least present, the decisions), while at the same time maintaining maximum “visibility” into how those decisions were made, so marketers retain the ability to derive insights and even intervene where necessary. These are just some of the things we’re working on behind the scenes at SiteSpect. We’re not only prepared for change, but in many cases we’re working with the world’s leading site operators to drive it forward for the rest of the industry.

Where do you see your firm in the next 5 years? What about you personally?
I’m intent on growing SiteSpect to become the unparalleled solution for digital marketing optimization. Towards that end, we’re growing our customer base and our business, and in the process adding cutting-edge capabilities to our optimization platform for multivariate testing and behavioral targeting. You’ll have to stay tuned to learn the specifics that we’ll be unveiling! One thing is for sure, this is an industry that rewards innovation and the ability to stay one step ahead of its practitioners needs. And that’s what keeps it interesting.