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Cost per click, cost per acquisition, pay per click, hits, time spent, unique users, unique visitors… the list goes on and on. With a bevy of systems and channels for marketing, how does a marketer make sense of it all? Well, fuggedabout metrics and start building your behavioral targeting systems – ASAP!
Let me explain. I don’t care about impression counts or numbers of unique users – those metrics are meaningless when you’re talking to your lines of business. There is only one metric that counts, and that is SALES. At the end of the day, if you don’t make the cash register ring, you won’t be worried about impression counts.
"OK, great," you say. "But how do you do that?"
 You have to start profiling behavior on your site in a way that you can collect data from organic traffic coming in, as well as any referral traffic arriving via Google and other sources. With a simple cookie, you can ID returning visitors. You also can add to their online profile if they engage in activities on your site such as downloading a white paper, listening to a podcast, reading a blog post.
With this type of information, paired with their profile, you can continue to communicate with them via email about interests they are expressing on your site.
I feel this is critical for marketers to be working on. The number of channels is exploding before our eyes – YouTube, blogs, wikis, etc. How are you going to track all that??
You have to have a baseline behavioral tracking system in place. Otherwise, you won’t get to second base by adding tracking from sister sites like blogs or wikis, which you launched for some marketing campaign but are not part of your domain.
Behavioral targeting is the only way to get real data about what a client, prospect, account or group of like buyers might want. It’s how you can help move the targeting needle for the sales team by continuing to nurture them until they reach the elusive moment of need for your product or service.
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Comments
Paul, thanks for bringing this concept to the FIX. This is an important post because behavioral targeting is the wave of the future.
The real challenge is many companies/marketers don't have the proper systems in place to integrate/store/analyze the information once they collect it. With the web being one of myriad channels, an advocated approach is to capture data from disparate sources across the enterprise, integrate that data into a single repository (data warehouse) to help build a complete view of all customer interactions. There is explosive business value in "integrated data".
Posted by: Paul Barsch | 01.17.08
Paul,
I actually had already read this on Paul's blog and thought it was an excellent article. Great choice to include here on the Daily Fix.
Posted by: Michael Lombardi | 01.17.08
Paul -
Another good post! Behavioral is the way to go. Many companies have gotten caught up in the hype of the past few years about what can be done, should be done and what can't be done. If a company has invested in an enterprise software systems (ERP, CRM etc) they already contain modules for this purpose.
Posted by: courtney benson | 01.17.08
I'm all for this transition, but what about the privacy issues?
Posted by: Seni Thomas | 01.17.08
Seni,
I think that's a very valid point and one that should be addressed by policy.
Think Amazon... they suggest products based on what you've looked at, searched for, and bought. Netflix also uses your movie rentals and ratings to suggest new movies you'd enjoy.
As long as everything you do is clearly outlined you should be okay.
Posted by: Michael Lombardi | 01.17.08
"you can continue to communicate with them via email about interests they are expressing on your site." I agree, this is the best way to understand intent.
Posted by: BetterRetail | 01.17.08
Seni and Michael
I agree with you both privacy is very important and with the proper policy in place and careful execution - you should not run a foul of any privacy concerns.
And BetterRetail picked up on the part of my post that talked about (implicitly) that the user has opt-ed in for this initially. So hopefully these emails will be welcomed.
good points guys - keep em comin!
Posted by: Paul Dunay | 01.17.08
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Posted by: bruce barondes | 02.06.08