Dive Brief:

• DemandJump has announced Traffic Cloud, a "prescriptive analytics" platform that uses artificial intelligence to map networks of traffic between sources and user flows to uncover which sites, sources, influencers, content and keywords can drive online traffic to specific brands and retailers, according to a press release.

• DemandJump collects more than 170 points of data for every event and pageview, and links customer activity across devices — not only for traffic activity happening on a retailer's own website, but also for the patterns occurring around traffic to competing websites. 

• Shawn Schwegman, chief strategy officer at DemandJump, told Retail Dive that Traffic Cloud has been through alpha and beta program deployments with several retailers over the last several months.

Dive Insight:

DemandJump is looking to solve a problem that many retailers and brands have, but may not realize just how much of a problem it is. Directing traffic to a retail website is still seen as the best way to increase the chance of online sales conversions, but many of the systems retailers use to help them do that are focused on delivering limited "post-funnel" data, including historical analytics and last click attribution, said Schwegman, a former Overstock executive.

"Most marketers have no idea that when they are looking at things like last click attribution they are only seeing about 20% of their ecosystem," he said.

The aim of Traffic Cloud, according to Schwegman, is to show retailers and marketers the other 80% — all of the site visits, social signals, click-throughs, handoffs and redirects that make up the broad network that feeds traffic toward a given website. If marketers have the big picture view, they will have more information to help make better decisions about how to acquire new customers, according to Julie Lyle, chief revenue officer of DemandJump, and former CMO of Walmart. She said traditional retailers in the mold of Walmart would have much to gain from a better understanding of traffic trends.

"Marketers have not been able to understand what they could not see," she said. "There are so many competitive heel-biters everywhere now. Traffic won't solve all of your competition challenges, but it can come pretty close." 

Schwegman added that some of the companies that have worked with Traffic Cloud in a beta capacity have realized benefits within the first 30 days after adoption. For example, a company he described as "the fourth fastest growing private e-commerce company in the U.S." was able to increase both their website traffic and revenue by more than 25% by applying Traffic Cloud insights to their affiliate marketing efforts.

Other companies have used the cloud-based system to help them better focus their display ads, according to DemandJump, in order to get them in front of potential customers on appropriate sites at appropriate times, instead of stalking the consumer with display ads on every site they visit.

Schwegman and Lyle said that technologies like the Traffic Cloud will help retailers make an evolutionary leap from the web traffic reporting platforms they use now, like Adobe Omniture. It's a leap they compared to web search's replacement of Altavista with Google and from brick-and-mortar shopping to Amazon.

DemandJump is just getting started in its effort to help marketers acquire more customers, but we may see more cloud-based systems for measuring traffic in the future.