This week in Business Intelligence class we learned more about conversion rates that we should implement in our Google Adwords challenge. It is important to increase pageviews during the challenge, but one of the most important things is having conversions. One way that the professor suggested was to count the pageviews that occur after the registration page, which is usually a thank you page. This seems like an important way to see if the pageviews were worthwhile or else it was not worth the cost to advertise.

The other lecture this week involved a guest lecturer from an up and coming company called SocialFlow. More information about this company can be found here:

http://www.socialflow.com/

Gilad showed us how the company uses Twitter and other tools such as Gephi and Python code to visualize this information. An example of a Gephi graph is shown below:

Source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2BSQkCU0cfmh4MxrHSuTuvkBTf9nKnNFvPlcuGPdSSjPtc0TeCzsfx5QMFulu6jWRb5w6R5o8H1qbNJMFPfF4NTgFhb0Kf51zm_Q6F75AK7zw-bIASyDtBwyM0p26Wv9L3VIjSEMk0PH6/s1600/gephi+sna.PNG

Graphs like these can be very useful for organizations that are trying to find out the type of people that are talking about their company. It can also help to understand where a Twitter tweet originated and how it progressed from there. Gilad showed us an example tweet where it moved from the original poster until it went viral.This is really cool since it can help to understand the origination of a tweet and what made it take off. For example, Gilad was saying that the tweets continued at a slow pace until a large follower tweeted with the hashtag, and then it started to take off. Twitter requires a large celebrity that is followed by many people to start the viral process.

In this class, we will need to create similar graphs, which should be interesting to learn more about. Sudha and Gilad informed us that data cleansing is one of the more time consuming parts, but is very important to have useful information derived from the data. I would like to learn more about how the information is being retrieved and stored.