Behavioral Targeting & Microsoft Gatineau

Now that the sneak previews have confirmed the existence of Microsoft Gatineau, let’s fetch some popcorn get comfy in our ringside seats as Microsoft and Google slug it out for nice big slice of search engine marketing pie. Gatineau Beta 1 will launch sometime this year. But if all the pizzazz rings true Gatineau’ will blend sizzling interface with some additional features that evem Google’s Web Analytics 2.0 provides. Hmm…so any indication the punch Bing is going to pack with its latest baby?

Not a very difficult question to answer if you have been looking closely at the shopping list this season of Google, AOL, Yahoo & Microsoft. Weathervane of search engine marketing points clearly to what the next development in SEM industry is going to be. Its optimization: a network’s ability to acquire a conversion at a lower cost then the competing networks and do it in increasing numbers. And to help them do this the big four have bought smaller network companies which study behavior or the browsing pattern of people and use the information to target them with highly relevant ads or content. So Google has bought Doubleclick, Bing has bought Aquantive, Yahoo has bought Rightmedia and now the latest – AOL has bought Tacoda. They all have something common to them they are all Behavioral Network Companies.

Behavioral targeting (BT) in the coming years will play an important role as internet traffic gets dense and people’s browsing habits get categorized. Reviews of Gatineau already suggest that it may have the ability to segment data in the age and gender bucket. Which means it will give us the ability to tailor make ads & content and target them to the gender and age segment thus insuring higher conversion rates and better user experience. This is just the beginning!

Imagine you have certain number of visitors who left your website with products in the shopping cart. All they may have needed was some incentive to make the purchase. Or people who looked at the product page did not start the purchase may need more information about the product. The goal is to use behavioral targeting to let you send the appropriate message to each user based on where they are in your product sales cycle. Using BT to deliver laser guide a relevant messages to your past website visitor is the most efficient use of your advertising dollars whether you are a brand awareness focused or direct response advertiser.

Three simple ways behavioral targeting will use to segment people’s behavior online, based on website/web page visited.

This is the common type of Behavioral Targeting. In this case behavioral segments are developed by total visitors who have gone to specific web sites that have very targeted content.

For example visitors who visit lonelyplanet.com, travelocity.com, or upstreamcruises.com, will become part of “Travel Segment” they are targeted with travel ads even when they later visit general websites.

Some other ways website visitors are targetted:

– Based on keyword searched or content that was read.This Behavioral segmentation is done by finding users who have searched for your product using specific keywords or have read content with specific keywords in it. For example, if a user was reading an article about Stock Market going up, the BT technology could target the top five keywords that surround the key concept of that page.

– Based on past visitors to your website.This is a fairly common type of Behavioral Targeting that creates behavioral segments of users who have visited your web site. This is done by placing unique code for different pages. By doing this you could create segments for “Home page viewers”, “Product information viewers” and “Shopping cart abandoned”. Based on these segments you could develop and deliver different messages to these three different segments

In other words — a visitor navigating through your web site is becoming a very powerful tool for website owners in the future. It's the foundation of website analytics, and is only going to grow and grow. Big Brother is watching you! In fact perhaps the gods at TechWyse are right now!