David Ramos, Director of Business Intelligence and Analytics

Elizabeth Rendon

LinkShare Corporation provides ecommerce businesses with a vast, high quality pay-per-action marketing network, along with expert consultative services and patented technology. LinkShare's cost-efficient pay per action (PPA) affiliate, search and lead generation campaigns acquire new customers, increase revenue and drive results. LinkShare clients are Fortune 500 and prominent companies doing business online, including J.C. Penney, 1-800-Flowers.com, American Express and Avon Products. LinkShare was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in New York City, with offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Tampa, London and Tokyo. LinkShare is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rakuten, Inc., headquartered in Tokyo (JASDAQ: 4755)

Analytics and business intelligence are among LinkShare’s primary competitive differentiators. LinkShare is able to provide its advertisers and publishers with detailed network performance analysis down to the click level. This allows advertisers to segment groups of publishers with specific consumer demographics. When a consumer clicks an ad from a publisher site and purchases something from the advertiser, the publisher and LinkShare receive a commission. LinkShare needed a scalable BI solution that would deliver rich and timely insight back to advertisers and publishers about their pay per action marketing initiatives in order to determine their return on investment (ROI). LinkShare evaluated three ROLAP platforms: CA, Microstrategy and Oracle BI EE. The key criteria were: scalability (native clustering), performance (comprehensive caching, multi-pass SQL and parallel operation, aggregate awareness), support for very large dimensions (100+ million rows), zero footprint web client, security, product vision, support, SDK and UNIX support. LinkShare conducted an extensive evaluation of both Microstrategy and Oracle BI EE. This process included detailed reference calls/visits; documentation review; prototype; and technical questionnaires. Their conclusion was that only Oracle BI EE provided the scalability, flexibility, security and vision to meet their needs. Today, Oracle BI EE is deployed internally and to their advertisers and publishers—exceeding 1 million total users. These users receive daily analysis on traffic, commissions, segments, and behavior. LinkShare uses their BI and data warehouse as a competitive differentiator and believes this solution has fundamentally impacted their business.