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!
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As you said, behavioral targeting did get categorized and is today a very important aspect in sales. Knowing what you visitors will instinctively do next is going to help you get to them faster and make them buy quicker.
Doing tests to see whether or not a message is better received by a larger group is also crucial and should be done often by websites that have a decent amount of traffic.
The idea of targeting people with ads based on their preferences is a good one but things can get too in your face. For example whatever website I am going to right now, I see ads for a TV because I want to buy one. At a certain point I will get bored by all these similar ads and what then?
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There is only one God that has the ultimate knowledge. I understand that getting information from visitors may lead to some privacy concerns. This being, if a person (like me) tends to use Google Chrome, Google search, Google+ and Gmail for example, I think that a lot of data may (or may not) already be under Google’s control.
From a marketing perspective, behavioral targeting could help advertisers better segment their ads. Now that Google has a social network, I wonder if it can be expected that Adwords permits in the future to pick specific demographics.
In fact, one asset that Facebook ads have over Adwords (or even Adcenter) is the fact that it is possible to really focus on a specific demographic.
Finally, I would like to note that sometimes the behavioral targeting does not seem to take into consideration the fact that you have already signed up for the product.
The use of funnels that exclude people who have already purchased could perhaps be a solution, unless the company is trying to develop some brand awareness.