Say you go through the entire process like we’ve been looking at here: search campaigns, banner campaigns, email campaigns, site-side targeting, event-based targeting, network-based targeting and ad server targeting. How do you possibly tie all of that response data together so that you can make actionable decisions? 

Many advertisers are at this stage right now. They have engaged the technologies and are generating the data, but they are still evaluating and making decisions about each initiative within the technical silos that they reside. The potential is there to know that an individual person who is landing on your homepage for the first time was (1) previously there before because of a search click, (2) previously saw four banners from an ad campaign and (3) is now responding to an event-based targeting campaign on a network.
 
The techniques in practice today have offered advertisers advantages in the areas of prospecting, identifying better sites and better messaging for generating preferred responses. They have enhanced the ability to position products and offerings on websites to increase the purchasing habits on websites, and they have empowered marketers with insight into how users will behave both externally and internally with respect to messaging.

But now we need to be able to tie it all together.

Put the puzzle together
Event-based targeting can begin with banners that are served across the web by having the serving history and the advertiser navigation patterns written to the advertiser’s first-party cookie. Banner serve decisions can be made based on customer segments assigned by eCRM written by the advertiser to the first-party cookie. Banner serve decisions can also be made just like with traditional network behavioral targeting, but across the entire web, using an ad server that can read the first-party cookie. CMS can react to banner serving history written to the advertiser’s first-party cookie by the ad server. eCRM can enhance the customer record based on information written by the site-side navigation tracking history of the analytics vendor using the advertiser’s first-party cookie.

So the commonality of the first-party cookie enables the advertiser to combine the various forms of behavioral targeting technologies, create more focused segments of both customers and prospects and create a data asset from which actionable decisions can be made.