ICN is delighted to announce another major new upgrade of its proprietary SQUID technology. Version 3 sees a major step forward in improving the quality of decision making data used, plus further upgrades to its email marketing module and reporting suite. Crucially though, for the first time 3.0 integrates tools and reporting techniques to help small and medium sized companies tackle the crucial issues of cyber security and AI Search.
ICN SQUID deploys the IPO (Input – Process – Output) methodology to help all companies and organisations achieve a better Return On Investment (ROI) from their marketing activities.
After making enhancements to the SQUID Plugin earlier in the year, which was very much focused on the ‘Input’ phase, 3.0 sees a major step forward on the ‘Process’ phase. After several months of testing and development, our AI algorithms now deploy Markov Attribution methodologies. This takes all the marketing touchpoints of a user and transforms them into a Markov chain. The algorithm trains on the data and then assigns credit to each marketing touchpoint.
This new attribution model in SQUID is a better way of analysing how important each marketing source is for your user traffic. Consider you have your user traffic, with how many times they visited your website and what source they came from.
Traditional algorithms, such as “last touch wins” models, will just attribute the source of the user to how they last visited your site. While this works, it’s biased and inaccurate. Markov Attribution looks at all the data of your users, trains on it and tells you accurately how important each source is for users visiting your site and converting.
Once you use this attribution algorithm in practice, you can directly see how influential your marketing sources and channels are.
Markov attribution is not the only major addition to SQUID with 3.0. Version 3 also sees the integration of tools to help organisations ensure they are right on top of two key issues of 2025: cyber security and AI search.
While large organisations will have the resources and budget to cope with the emerging cyber security, it is a genuine potential minefield for other organisations, where leaders know there is an increased risk, realise they need to manage that risk, but understandably concerned about the time and money that might be lost seeking to achieve that, versus the time and money that also might be lost in the event of an incident taking place.
For the first time, SQUID features tools to enable companies begin to automate various steps to reducing cyber security risks, while putting in place alerts and reporting mechanisms to track and quantify what represents a credible threat in this area. In 3.0 this includes:
- Daily malware scans to the relevant WHM (Web Host Manager), tracked and reported on with automatic notifications of any suspicious activity, activiating real-time on access scanning.
- Automated server monitoring, and the addition of customised firewall plugins as standard for all WHM servers.
Meanwhile, AI search has become the dominant methodology deployed by search engines over recent months, and we are all seeing it feature at the top of our searches. Ensuring that your organisation’s search engine optimisation (SEO) realigns to this is crucial for staying ahead in this area. Version 3.0 of SQUID introduces reporting capabilities tracking the effectiveness of your AI search performance over time and ideas for enhancements and improvements are available from our team.
We know you will love Version 3 but we aren’t stopping there. Look out for further upgrades in version 3.1 in the autumn…
