Razorwire Consulting

After spending some time as a market analyst, I did a year and a half of freelance data analysis for various companies and organizations. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a ton. Here are some of my favourite pieces.

Air Canada
Liberal Party of Canada
Halifax Stanfield International Airport
Memorial University
East Coast Music Awards
Silencer Shop
Reveille Fine Clothier
RentSpot

Air Canada

This was a big one. We didn't even want to tell our friends and family this was a possibility until the contract was signed for sure.

Anyone who does a lot of business travel knows it quickly loses its glamorous appeal. Soon, you just want to get there and back as quickly and cheaply as possible. Enter the Air Canada Halifax Commuter Pass.

Targeted at business people travelling around the Atlantic region on a frequent basis, the Pass allowed you to buy a book of tickets, up front, for one set-in-stone fee. No fees, no hassle, just book and go when you need to.

They contacted us to create and manage a data-driven advertising campaign for them, using Google AdWords. After we set up the usual travel keywords and ad copy, we dove a little bit deeper, and placed ads on websites dedicated to maps and directions.

We were betting no other travel advertisers had made this connection, and it paid off richly. Right when our target market was looking at how long it would take to drive to their destination, and the dread of another long road trip was forming in their head... they saw our ad, and clicked in droves.

Liberal Party of Canada

What better example of the power of data than affecting national politics?

This was one of our earliest clients - they had an enormous dataset for us to practice on, and we agreed not to charge them very much money. Both sides were happy.

Mike Crawley was a candidate for President of the Liberal Party of Canada. As the Liberal results at the previous election had been, let's say, underwhelming, there was enormous public interest to see who would head up the administrative machine for the next time around.

We analyzed any link traffic to the website, and passed it along to campaign headquarters so they could receive a personal call thanking them, no matter how small their site was. We also monitored how larger external media climate affected site traffic. After a front page article in the Globe and Mail, we saw traffic spike 2060% in one day!

In the end, Mike was successful in his bid for the office, edging out his rival by fewer than 1,000 votes. We wish him all the best.

Halifax Stanfield International Airport

Named top airport in its class for nearly a decade running, and located in one of the finest cities anywhere in the world (in our humble and biased opinion), consulting on the data-driven redesign of Halifax Stanfield International Airport's website presented an interesting challenge.

We spent the bulk of our time wading through the largest dataset we've yet been tasked to. When you run a major international airport, and you ask us to review an entire year's worth of website visits, that's a fairly significant project. And we were overjoyed to do it.

Anyway, we were proud to see the same recommendations we made to them prominently displayed as requirements during the RFP process for their new website, and believe that when the new site goes live, our efforts will have led to a much more pleasant browsing experience.

Memorial University

On Newfoundland's west coast, there exists one of the country's finest Fine Arts programs. The Grenfell campus of Memorial University was our first client in the not-for-profit sector, and we have tremendously enjoyed working with them.

We also learned a great deal about working with YouTube ads during our time with them. They produced a stunning 30 second advertisement, which you may have also seen during airings of American Idol, Heartland, or Republic of Doyle, that we were able to seamlessly integrate with the campaign.

At last count, that video had been seen over 100,000 times, at a staggeringly low cost per view rate. We were happy, they were happy, and the students who have chosen Grenfell as a result of this campaign will certainly be happy.

East Coast Music Awards

There is no doubt in our minds that Canada's East Coast produces some of the best musicians on the planet. Bar none. So when the opportunity arose to help out the ECMAs with their 25th Anniversary People's Choice Awards? We were ecstatic.

The organizers were kind enough to send us a list of the hometowns of each band, so that in addition to blanketing the entire East Coast with ads asking for votes, we could target those places specifically with ads asking them to vote for their hometown heroes.

And the results were spectacular, recording thousands of votes across all four Atlantic provinces. We remember sitting back with a cup of coffee, browsing through the results, and thinking, "You know, we're really pleased with how this went."

Rock on, ECMAs.

Silencer Shop

We try to be as neutral as possible in our work here at Razorwire. Data is data, no matter the source. However, some of our clients certainly get a bigger reaction than others when we mention them at parties.

Silencer Shop is one of those clients. Based out of Austin, Texas, they are the premier online supplier of firearm suppressors (the technical term for a "silencer"). They provide reviews, a full section dealing with the legal structure of suppressor/silencer purchase and ownership, and a wide selection of suppressors/silencers and accessories.

Razorwire keeps track of what product lines are moving quickest, which categories are most popular, when their busiest shopping times are, and the response to any reviews and/or blog posts they publish.

Certainly never a dull moment on this site.

Reveille Fine Clothier

Whenever people ask what our target market is, we tell them, "Well, one of our biggest clients sells firearm accessories. Another sells vintage clothing. Our target market is businesses with data."

And that's really what it comes down to.

Based out of Portland, Oregon, Reveille Fine Clothier offers some of the highest quality clothes available online, from labels often not available anywhere else in North America.

Razorwire helped Reveille understand what times of day their customers were most likely to be on the site, and what lines were performing best. From that, they were able to improve their marketing efforts, and engage more with their customer base.

RentSpot

Second only to Halifax Airport in sheer size, this project currently holds the title for Most Complex Dataset.

RentSpot is one of Canada's largest databases of apartments, condominiums, and houses for rent, and they wanted us to sort through the bucketloads of data their site produces every day, to try to make some sort of sense out of it.

And so we set to work. We filtered. And segmented. And regression analysis-ed. They say every chunk of marble has a sculpture within, and we did our best to reveal it. Apartment hunting can be trying at the best of times, but with our help, RentSpot makes it easier.