Behavioral Targeting: Six Easy Ways to Get Started

At the CM Show in Chicago, Magazines.com's Kate O’Neill and Dow Jones' David Chivers gave a presentation entitled “Behavorial Marketing in Action for Audience-Acquisition” and provided these six tips to get the ball rolling.

By Chandra Johnson-Greene
Friday, August 29, 2008

At the recent CM Show in Chicago, Kate O’Neill, director, customer experience & product development, Magazines. com, and David Chivers, director for online marketing, Dow Jones, gave a presentation entitled “Behavorial Marketing in Action for Audience-Acquisition” and provided these six tips to get the ball rolling:

1. Read your reports for meaningful segments
Chances are, you’re already collecting data that could optimize customers’ experience as well as revenues. Most analytics platforms can tell you about new versus returning visitors, as well as first-time buyers versus repeat customers. Chances are also pretty good that each of these groups is behaving somewhat to very differently on your site, and if you don’t figure out what works best for each, you’re leaving money on the table.

2. Traditional direct response tactics still work
Behavioral targeting and marketing approaches are heavily borrowed from the domain of direct response. Meaningful segments, appealing offers, and consistent remarketing are all part of a well-rounded practice.

3. Focus on easily segmented audiences
Sometimes you can spot a useful segment, but actually breaking it out for targeting purposes may be trickier than you expect. (Geotargeting falls into this category for many sites). Unless you’re a black belt behavioral marketer, you probably have lower-hanging opportunities to pursue. Think in terms of both providing the biggest returns and taking on the least daunting set-up to find the hidden treasure on your site.

4. Optimize campaigns
It’s likely that you can realize substantial gains in your success metrics by thinking at a high level about audience characteristics, and then monitoring more granular groupings for meaningful patterns. Most of the groupings you follow won’t perform in a way that bears statistically significant differences to your control group, but the ones that stand out can always be segments in a future campaign.

5. Match messages
The content you display on your site and in your ad networks can be adjusted based on any number of factors. Look for opportunities to tighten your message and your call to action based on context.

6. Test, test, test
The only way you’ll know what works is to test it and test it again. Invest in a testing platform and process that provides you with the flexibility and the visibility to act and learn quickly, and it will pay for itself many times over.