Or how to get the haystack to help you find the needle.
By Mark Taylor, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Wunderman
January 01, 2008
Today’s consumer is proving to be increasingly elusive. The multiplication of channels and the fragmentation of audiences have driven two imperatives for marketers online. The first is to better identify potential consumers in the funnel early and attract them at the appropriate time. The second is to ensure that your Web property (site, landing page, etc.) is immediately relevant to your visitors’ needs. In response to these challenges, some marketers are turning to a useful technique called behavioral targeting.
Behavioral targeting: two types
There basically are two types of behavioral targeting — one that’s getting increasing attention, and one that has perhaps been around longer but is still getting less attention than it deserves based on its merits and capacity to completely transform online marketing efforts.
The former is what I’ll call off-site behavioral targeting, which is a way of anonymously targeting (or retargeting) relevant ads based on browsing behavior. There are many pros and cons here — mostly around privacy concerns — that we can chew on another day. Companies that focus on this kind of targeting include TACODA (purchased by AOL), Revenue Science and 24/7 Real Media.
The latter is what I’ll, not surprisingly, refer to as on-site behavioral targeting. This is where one uses data about anonymous browsers to present the most relevant content possible. The advantages of doing this are simple to understand. Relevance, after all, is the mother of engagement — the more relevant your content immediately appears to be, the more likely customers are to want to engage with you. That’s obvious, right? And it wouldn’t be an issue if we were collectively doing a reasonable job of engaging our customers on our sites.
However, that is not the case. In spite of the growing online audience, (there were 60 billion individual searches worldwide in November alone last year), and the increasing budgets — more than $16 billion in online alone, not including offline work that is focused on driving eyeballs to the Web — we are still seeing conversion rates of less than 4 percent. That’s a lot of traffic that we have either paid for or otherwise earned that finds no compelling reason to further engage with us.
This is a number that drives me nuts. When you consider the amount of time, effort and investment that we have collectively made in ensuring that the whole search engine marketing industry becomes one of the most efficient markets ever seen, and that search optimization basically is a science in itself, how can it be that the online destinations proposed are so completely irrelevant to the customers’ declared needs that 96 percent of them go somewhere else without leaving a trace?
