I can find there are multiple API available to book bus tickets , flight tickets and so on like (expedia , redbus) . I just need to know where these systems are centralized and how they are doing it ? . Well it seems a rookie question unfortunately im one of them .
Thanks for reading !
You're spot on, they are centralized. I have friends who work in companies on both sides of the table (Hipmunk, Hotwire, etc). You'll notice when you browse their listing, it's all the same information wrapped in a different UI with a couple of different promotions added on. They're all able to serve you the same price/data because they all have leverage. With this leverage, travel agencies, airlines, and hotels, are able to aggregate and vend this information to all these travel brands in an organized fashion. Unless you have the buying power of these large corporations, you essentially have to use their API.
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I've been doing some research on intent data and I have some technical questions, especially about how two businesses might be collecting "contact level" i.e. personally identified web traffic details without using third-party cookies.
Some quick background: Most of the large providers of intent data (bombora, the big willow/aberdeen/Spiceworks Ziff Davis, Tech Target etc.) offer "account" based intent data - essentially when users visit websites in their network, they do a reverse IP addresses lookup, match them to know IP addresses of large companies (usually companies with at least 250 employees) and note what topics are "surging" - aka showing unusual traffic on a given week. This largely makes sense to me. I'm assuming that when a visitor shows up at your site, google analytics and similar tools can tell you what google search keywords were used to arrive at your site, and that's how they can say things like - we can "observe intent signals across an unlimited number of contextual keyword categories, allowing you to customize your keywords and layer these insights onto your campaigns for optimal performance." Third party cookies, and data from DSP's (demand side platform's enabling ad buyers to buy ads across many platforms) are also involved in providing data, those these will be less useful sources of data after google sunset's third party cookies on Chrome.
Two providers - intentdata.io, and intentflow.com are offering contact level intent data. You can imagine why that would be of interest - if the director of sales is interested in your sales SaaS tool, you have a better idea of how qualified that lead is and who to reach out to. Only one of the two providers is specific about what exactly they're collecting - i.e. what "intent" they are capturing and how they're collecting it.
Intentdata.io:
Intentdata.io looks like a tiny company (two employees on LinkedIn). The most specific statement I've found about what their data is was in an Impact+ podcast interview - Ed, the CRO at intentdata.io, mentions that the data is analogous to commenting on a Forbes article or a conversation on LinkedIn. But he's clear - "that's just an analogy." They also say elsewhere that the data they provide mentions specifically what action the contact took that landed them in the provided data.
Ed from intentdata.io is also asked about GDPR compliance in his Impact+ interview - he basically says, some lawyers will disagree but he believes their data to be GDPR compliant, and it is in use by some firms in the EU. He does mention though that some firms have asked them to exclude certain columns from the data, like email addresses.
Edit: Found a bit more on intentdata.io - looks like they build a custom setup to pull "intent" data for each customer - they don't have a database monitoring company interaction with content across social media and b2b sites, instead you provide them with "lists (names and URLs) of customers, competitors, influencers, events, target accounts and key terms that would indicate intent at different stages in the buying journey. Pull together important hashtags, details on your ideal buyer (job titles, functions, seniority) and firmographics (size, industry, location)" - then they create a custom "algorithm" from this info, and they iterate on that "algorithm" a little bit over time.
They also make this statement on their site: "IntentData.io's data is collected from observing public actions that users are taking around the web. That means that first, we observe action (not reading, searching, browsing, being shown an ad, etc.) which we believe is a more concrete manifestation of intent. Second, people are taking these actions publicly for the world to see. We do not use any cookies, bidstream data or reverse IP lookups."
Finally one piece of their sales collateral asks: What ad budget do you have for PPC nurturing ads? So their may be some targeted PPC ads involved in the "algorithm."
Edit 2: Their sales collateral also states that they use "a third-party intent data methodology that uses multi-variable linear regression analysis to correlate observed actions with a specific contact. This is the method that the LeadSift engine of IntentData.io data uses."
Intentflow.com:
Intentflow.com seems like the sketchier of the two providers if I'm honest. They provide a video walkthrough of how they get their data at intentflow.com/thesis - but I'm not following how using "traceable urls" with no cookies involved, could give you contact level information. They also say they lookup what the most popular articles/pages are for 5k to 40k unique keywords or phrases that are related to 10-50 keywords or phrases you give them to target. And they use "traceable urls" to track who visits those sites. Again - no cookies involved. Supposedly fully compliant at least with US laws. They don't provide data for the EU "by design" so presumably they're not GDPR compliant? They also claim they can identify the individuals who are visiting your website, again using "traceable urls" - it seems clear from the pitch that you're asked to reach out to your backlink providers around the web to use this traceable url.
I've seen an interview where a rep from Bombora says they tried for a while to do contact level intent data and it wasn't very useful - and it wasn't really doable in a compliant way. Ed seems to be aware they've said that publicly, and he says "that's just not true."
So what's going on here? How exactly are these two small firms getting contact level intent data? Do you think they're doing it in a compliant way?
Got more information:
Intentdata.io use public comments, likes, shares etc. on blogs, social posts via web crawling and scraping for events, influencers, hashtags, articles etc. that the customer deems worth tracking. They do some work to try and connect the commenters with an identifiable contact. They bill on a quarterly basis for this.
Intentflow.com doesn't seem to use "traceable urls" at all. They take bidstream data, and identify the individual visitors via an "identity graph." They provide a minimum of 5k contacts per month at $2 per contact, making their data very expensive ($120k+ per year). You can't get lower than however many contacts their system spits out per month so it seems like there's not a good firm limit on what you will be charged. They say they can identify ~70% of web traffic, and they only provide data on US site visitors. Each row of their output would include not just the contact, but the site that contact was shown an ad on. Definitely interesting data - but I'm guessing they will be very affected by upcoming changes to third party cookies, privacy laws, etc.
This seems really basic but i am struggling with it
We have a client who runs a travel website.
They have a few different search bars eg Flights, Hotels, Carhire.
I am trying to track the performance of each... "What % of people completed a sale that ran a Flight search." Same for Hotel, and for Car hire
Any ideas for the best way to get this info in GA?
Many thanks
There are a few ways to get this information, each with their pros and cons. The options that I see immediately available are segments and goals.
Segments are great because they are retrospective and generally more flexible, with the ability to be changed if you find your criteria isn't quite right. You create here, and specify sessions that go through search results pages etc:
Then you can create another segment for booking confirmation page, and any other intermediary steps that you'd like to report on. The main con of segments is that you can only pull in 4 at a time, but if you have more you can pull them 4 at a time and copy+paste the data into an excel sheet or google sheet. Segments can also be pulled via the Core Reporting Api and DataStudio which makes them great for automating into dashboards.
Goals are cool because they pull into the default reports, and basically track sessions through a particular page, event or sequence. The main con I see and the reason is that I don't use them is that they only start tracking fro mthe time you create them , and if you change the configuration it does not impact historical data, so your data can get messed up quickly if you don't have sandbox GA views or sandbox goals for your testing before putting it into a dedicated goal slot. You can also only have 10 or 20 goals depending on your plan, so once data is tracked against that goal you can't remove or clear it.
There are two Swiss (.ch) websites, let's call them A and B. A is owned by me and B by a customer.
Because of legal data protection issues B is hosted in Switzerland and not allowed to store any user information abroad. Which means that software like Google Analytics is not available on B. A is a Swiss website but hosted in a (European) cloud.
Now we would like to find out how many common users we both have over the duration of 30 days. In short:
numberOfUsersA ∩ numberOfUsersB
For the sake of simplicity: Instead of users we are perfectly happy to measure common browsers.
What would you suggest is the simplest way to solve this problem?
First off all, best regards from Zurich/Zug :) Swiss people are everywhere...
I don't think you're correct that it's not legal to collect data in Switzerland at all (also abroad). As I'm working in the financial industry I know this topic very well and we also had to do a lot research to use GA at all.
It's always the question what and how you collect data. What you can't do - beside you got in upfront the permission of the user - is storing personal identifiable information. That's anyway not allowed by GA - you can't import/save in custom dimension/metrics for example email addresses.
Please check https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6156630?hl=en as general basic information about this topic.
If you save the IP addresses via IP anonymization, you shouldn't run into problems if you're declaring this in your data-privacy statements. Take this approach: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en
I'm not a lawyer and also not want to give you legal advises, but ours told us that's fine. If you are real paranoid about sending data to the USA - like we have to be - you can exclude your tracking from very sensitive forms.
To go back to your basic question, if you want to find this out via Google Analytics, your key is "cross domain tracking". Check https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en for more information in this direction.
The only work-around I have in my mind beside this, is if you start collecting browser-fingerprints yourself and then connect both collections over the finger prints together (that's not save, as your visitors will use more than one device/configuration). I personally would go for the IP anonimization, exclude very sensitive forms and ensure that your data-privacy declaration contains all necessary parts for and offer an opt-out option then you should be on the safe side.
All the best and TGIF :)
For an university project (Big Data lecture), I’d like to analyze auctions on eBay. I wasn’t able to find reliable information so far whether it’s possible to get all current auctions on eBay via their API or not. I only need the auction title and the current price and I am aware that this is a huge load of data, but I’m just curios.
I don't think it's possible, in part because of the huge amount of data, and perhaps also because I don't think eBay wants people downloading data en masse like that. Doing so might allow people to do data mining and market research from a vantage point that is too publicly revealing for them.
If you're willing to settle for a large segment of data, look into eBay's Large Merchant Services and their LMS API.
For your research project, you should be able to make sense of an even smaller subset of data by just pulling from eBay's Finding API in a few automated large chunks.
I know how to easily control who can view what in a site by using the membership and roles feature. However, I now want to take this a step further and allow people to purchase access to specific features, billed monthly. Basically I need a combination of an e-commerce site that sells products, mixed with a role based membership site. Below is an example of a scenario we are looking to solve:
Our site has the following sections (products):
learn spanish, learn french, learn german, learn english
We now want users to be able to buy access to just what they want. So we can give a price to each of these products.
We would also like to offer bundling discounts, so buy 2 and get $10 off. Buy all 4 and get 25% off. This should be automatic, but if needed, a coupon is fine as long as it can figure out the logic of making sure they have the correct item
We would like to restrict discounts so that we can offer them only to the first 100 people or from the days X to Y (ideally a coupon system maybe)
We want users to be "grand fathered" if we update pricing. So if someone signed up for all at $60 a month, and we later make it $100, they stay at $60
This is a monthly service so we would need it to create our invoices and work with our CC processor. I know this will involve us making an API if the system doesn't include our processor.
If possible we would love for "Pro-Rated" features, so if they currently are paying for 3 items and they have 13 days left till next billing date, they can add the 4th and pay a pro-rated amount.
All of these features are very common features for an advanced membership site, however I am just not sure what to search for to find a framework like this. I can find eCommerce and I can find role based membership, but have yet to find a decent combination of the two.
Licensed is fine as long as it works for what we need.
Thanks in advance