BT: More Than You Bargained For
Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 7:06 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine
Sometimes the campaign results you get are entirely different from what you expected. Sometimes different means better.
A recent JupiterResearch report, as reported on ClickZ by columnist Anna Papadopoulos:
“[A]dvertisers who have used behavioral targeting in the past 12 months are 17 percent more satisfied than advertisers who have not used it, despite campaign objectives.”
[emphasis mine]
Note that last phrase. Even though they started out with certain goals and expectations, which may or may not have been fulfilled, they were happier using Behavioral Targeting than not.
That doesn’t happen often, that we’re more pleased with the results than we intended to be. As realistic idealists (in which category I place almost all affiliate marketers… otherwise they’d be in a different economic endeavor…), we generally hope for the best and settle for what we get.
If Behavioral Targeting can accomplish that, it’s probably something special. But what is it?
As with any marketing term or strategy the definition isn’t as tightly constrained as, say, that of “Eurobond”. Search as you may, you’ll rarely find an expert that even offers a definition, much less the same one most others are using.
So, I’ll skip any technical discussion and shoot straight for common sense. “Behavioral targeting is simply using the behavior of the website visitor to target the message you deliver to them.”
But what behavior is that? Surfers do lots of things, after all. Russell Shaw in a now-aging, but still relevant, column on iMedia uses this example.
“For example, repeat visits to a Web page with reviews of sport utility vehicles, coupled with a cruise to the automotive section of classified ads on a site, clearly indicate at least a curiosity about SUVs.
Now, let us suppose that same visitor is also going to pages where she clicks through to an online book seller to a book about how to help your child adjust to kindergarten. Behavioral targeting specialists may look at this data and start to conclude that the site visitor is looking for an SUV to fit the transportation needs of her growing brood.”
I could have made up my own example, but this one is excellent. The surfer is clearly looking for something and by monitoring that user’s behavior — by observing what they click on not once but repeatedly, and where they came from and where they go to — a pattern emerges over time.
Behavioral targeting requires using navigation data over time to analyze what your potential customer wants.
Does that mean it has to represent a time-consuming analysis project for an already over-burdened schedule? Not necessarily. Tune in next time…
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