Technology is making it easier to bucket your site's users and market to them more effectively. Underscore Marketing's president shows you the nuts and bolts.
Retargeting has always been an effective way to re-engage prospects. The basic idea is to place action tags from a particular network on your site, such that they can write a cookie to your users' hard drives. If and when that cookie is recognized later, as a site visitor surfs the web, it presents an opportunity to serve a special ad.
When one thinks about it for a minute, this tactic is better executed not from the network side but with an agency-side ad management system. Whereas behavioral targeting networks like TACODA or DrivePM or Revenue Science can identify prior site visitors on their network, advertiser-side ad management systems, most notably DoubleClick's DART for Agencies (DFA), can identify and segment them across entire campaigns. Advertiser-side systems are also taking retargeting to the next level, beyond where we've been with simple identification of prior site visitors.
What's the difference?
Advertiser-side retargeting is probably better described as behavioral segmentation. By tagging your site with action tags, DFA allows an advertiser to recognize site visitors as they are encountered in future campaigns. But that's just the start of the fun.
Prior site visitors can be bucketed according to what they've done (or haven't done, for that matter) on an advertiser's website. Now it's easy to distinguish between the casual visitor, loyal purchaser and occasional buyer, using some simple logic rules. The ad server allows for segmentation based on which action tags have fired, and not just on whether or not they've fired. Can you imagine setting your site up so that action tags can help you bucket your users?
Taking it to the next level
That's exactly what we should be doing-- identifying these customers and visitors and calling upon our old database marketing skills to make sure that they get the right message. A loyalist who has purchased quite a bit from your website in the past few weeks might be targeted with a special reward for top customers, like an enrollment offer for a continuity or rewards program. Other purchasers might receive upsell or cross-sell messages. Non-purchasers might get a message that sweetens the deal and tips them toward purchasing.
There are two really compelling things about doing this from the advertiser's side. The first is the segmentation I just described-- defining buckets of site visitors the way you want to and delivering appropriate messaging. The second is the flexibility to retarget across your entire campaign. An advertiser can define a set of rules that segments site visitors across a buy, regardless of where the ads appear. This should come as welcome news to those of you who have had multiple retargeting buys running with a handful of ad networks.
The nuts and bolts
The way to start with a segmentation strategy is to audit the various actions on your website that can make a difference with respect to defining your visitor base. Tagging purchase behavior is a good start, but you might want to look at other actions that can define the ways in which a site visitor can interact with your brand. Does your site have a community section? Is there something to be gained by identifying people who post product reviews?
Make a list of all the actions that matter, then tag your site appropriately. It will also help to lay out these behaviors on a spreadsheet in a grid format, so that you can begin assigning messages to various user buckets.
When you have this all laid out, work with your ad management company or ad agency to develop appropriate creative and assign it to the proper actions. This approach can easily result in conversion rates an order of magnitude higher than what you'd typically experience through an ad campaign that doesn't distinguish between prospects and site visitors.
Happy bucketing!
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.