With so many advertisers stuck in Behavioral Marketing 101, Underscore Marketing's president explains how to take advantage of BT's strengths.
In this article:
Introduction
Recognizing Your Visitors
Contextual Ads: We Can Do Better
Is Search Behavioral Targeting?
How to Take Advantage
Welcome to the Behavioral Targeting Masquerade, where everybody wants to get on the BT bandwagon, but many are hiding something behind their masks.
As more and more companies -- from ad networks to ad servers to portal sites -- debut new behavioral offerings, we see that some offer robust targeting that can use web behavior to increase ad effectiveness, while others merely dip their toes in BT. These toe-dippers have products that technically make use of web behavior, but they're really only about "behavioral targeting" to the same degree that Green Day was a punk band.
Where does retargeting fit? Retargeting is an interesting animal, and it represents a 101-level concept that many advertisers could stand to take to the next level. The idea is to pixel-tag your website, such that an ad server can distinguish between people who have visited your website and people who haven't. Many advertisers place the pixels on their pages for a while and then use a large content site or an ad network to target their customers the next time the ad server encounters them.
This is an effective tactic, no doubt, and we've seen it perform very successfully for several clients. It's much easier to convert someone who has visited you before and who is already familiar with what you have to offer. That said, "site visitor" does not necessarily equate to "customer," and the opportunity here is to begin segmenting site visitors into several buckets based on their on-site behavior, much like traditional database marketers do.
Targeting site visitors is a 101-level tactic. Taking the next step into 201-level territory involves looking at the specific behaviors exhibited on your website, so that appropriate messages can be served to different types of visitors and appropriate media levels can be set against buckets of visitors.
Try segmenting buyers out from non-buyers as a first step. If you sell on your web site, you can easily do this by placing a pixel on whichever pages are returned whenever a successful transaction is logged, like "Thank you, your order is on its way" pages. Buyers are more apt to want a loyalty or upsell message, whereas non-buyers may need something to sweeten the deal, like a coupon or special offer. If you keep targeting these two groups of people with the same message, either the buyers are going to start thinking you don't value their business, or the non-buyers are going to think you're clueless and don't understand them. Or both.
An even more robust retargeting strategy would look more closely at on-site behavior and start to distinguish between heavy and light buyers. While you may not be able to glean insights with respect to how much individual people are buying from your competitors, you may be able to make some educated guesses by comparing purchasing behavior to the typical share of requirements within the category. In other words, if someone consistently orders four pizzas a month from your website and the typical category user is good for 4-5 pizzas a month, you might be able to put that person in the loyalist bucket.
Next: Recognizing Your Visitors