From tracking to behavioral targeting

[jondyer]

Love this blog post form SEL. It really shows the direction that analytics is taking us... to behavioral and predictive models.

http://searchengineland.com/behavioral- ... itor-30015

Key Paragraph...

From tracking to behavioral targeting

Web analytics has been constantly developing since the 1990s. In the beginning there was data, and initially the struggle was to collect it accurately and provide reports on the state of websites, usually from an IT perspective. Then, with the turn of the millennium, analysts felt the necessity to turn numbers into insights, and the field evolved from simple data reporting to analysis. Today, marketers increasingly understand that testing is the way to go when it comes to design and implementation of websites (in other words, intuition-based decisions don’t really work well). Said another way, the customer should decide what works and what doesn’t (this phase is still rapidly evolving).

[latha]

The term "Behavioral marketing " has been thrown around quite a lot. Daniel presents his views very well. He pointed to - eMarketer's research on this subject.

I dont think the stats are correctly presented on eMarketer. The questions asked are very dicy. For example if you have a question "Show you ads that are tailored to your interests", I would click on NO. No wonder 66% said no. Who would want to be sold to, not me, never.

The trick is what if I didn't know I was being sold to. What if the ad which showed up had the product which so satisfied my need ? Ofcourse I would love that. It would save me tons and tons of research. I would love the website too and come back for more. It's not that I don't want the product, or do not have the buying capacity. It's the feeling of being led to buy something which I might have not wanted, it's the feeling of being tricked and trust being violated.

Behavioural marketing is actually a blessing, it shows me things which interest me, shows me products which would help solve my problem and/or address the issue and for some it might add the feeling that someone truly cares.

Google and Yahoo are definitely using this. Why does YWA have an edge? Because they give what the user wants.
How?
They provide me, the website owner with a nice statistical picture (no hype) of what my visitors like. It tells me where they are from, what's their income level, are they male or female, are they baby boomers (they have lots of money to spend), are they satisfied (bounce rate can be used here).

What can I do with this information?
I would read it like a mystery novel.
I would create the perfect customer using this information, somethings like:
"Jane is 25 yrs old. She is very interested in Baseball. She loves Tshirts. She earns $60,000 per year. She loves new products and is a repeat buyer. She has loyalty to my website."

I can write any story I want, then use YWA or GA to direct each scene. I am all in for behavioural marketing. If used wiselhy it would be the difference between making none to making millions.

The question is, do you understand your customer?
Do you even want to?