Recently a friend ask me what my thoughts were on using onsite behavioral targeting and if I would recommend it to my clients. I told them, to be honest I have only tracked and monitored the results for a massive eCommerce website. Not having enough knowledge about onsite behavioral targeting I couldn’t make any recommendations to my clients because I know what works for one website might not work for another. The question got me thinking and reading more about what behavioral targeting was. I found that there were credited articles for it and against. I thought I would share my research findings and hopefully the material will help you make the decision.

First let’s define onsite behavioral targeting: it is simply personalizing the experience for your visitor by serving ads that are most relevant to them. The theory is that by presenting each individual user with a personalized optimal experience, it will increase their likelihood of taking the desired action. Most platforms are built with data compiled from clickstream data and IP information or cookies.

There is a saying in the ad community which is “start where your audience is”. Onsite behavioral targeting can greatly benefit an organization’s online marketing program and Forrester Research reported this emerging category as the #1 area for planned investment. The ability to reach at an individual user-level with the right messaging with minimal human interaction is one the highest reward but other features of the platform are:

• Improved acquisition spend
• When visitors are engaging with your site, their actions and behaviors are captured and incorporated into the persona profiles
• Real time data mining, reporting and analysis
• The automation of optimization
• Relevant content will always be king

A recent study from researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of California Berkeley School of Law and the Annenberg Public Policy Center reports that most internet users don’t want tailored advertisements. When Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages— between 73% and 86%—say they would not want such advertising. Other than Private Privacy issues here are some other factors to consider:

• Some organizations have not fully created and implemented their persona’s online
• Most effective for organizations that have sufficient size / scale to provide a return on the required investment
• Implementing a behavioral targeting program can be difficult (may need extra resources)
• Requires human intervention to update creative, offers, and modify business rules

So after reading about onsite behavioral targeting would I recommend it to my clients? The jury is still out on this one. I only say that because I can’t stop thinking about Jakob Nielsen report on banner blindness. It states that if users are looking for a snippet of information on a page or are engrossed in content, they won’t be distracted by the ads on the side. I sort of agree but does your website use  behavioral targeting tactics for ad banners? If so please let me know what your experiences have been!

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Tags: Behavioral Targeting, User Experience, website analytics

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 11:25 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.