Behavioral fingerprinting
Behavioral fingerprinting is not the subject of an episode of "CSI: Miami." It's a technique that sounds complex but is actually fairly simple. By fairly simple, I mean that it can be executed easily today without much in the way of strategic planning on the marketing or agency side.
The basic idea is to identify your customers and prospects and look to commonalities in their behavioral profiles. You can do this by tagging your website and having your favorite behavioral marketing company identify the intersection between your site's customers and people on whom they've collected behavioral data.
Some obvious behaviors will index highly against your customer base. You'll probably respond with a "No duh!" when your consumer electronics site's customers index well against visiting consumer electronics review sites. But some non-obvious things will also pop out at you. I'm making this up, but you might notice a propensity for gardening, or leisure travel. These tendencies become part of a behavioral fingerprint that can now be used to target people elsewhere on the web.
I first saw this actually executed in the CPG category with Yahoo!'s Consumer Direct program. While your marketing intuition might be telling you that behavior that is not directly related to your business might not have any bearing on whether or not someone is an ideal customer, I can tell you it has significant impact. The lift in metrics associated with targeting customers in this fashion is well worth the cost of developing the fingerprint and deploying it across the web to identify prospects.
Although Yahoo has been able to prove success with this fingerprinting method for years now, there's no reason why behavioral networks or other sites employing behavioral targeting technology can't be successful in employing the tactic. As with most behavioral targeting programs, the returns increase with scale, so look for high potential reach and critical mass when putting together a fingerprinting program.
