CRM - January 2008 - (Page 28)

BEHAVIORAL TARGETING targeting based on recency and frequency seems to be the best bet for today’s marketers. “[A consumer’s] historical Web-surfing behavior is absolutely critical,” Vanderhook says. Perhaps, then, one of the main reasons so few marketers are jumping on the behavioral-targeting bandwagon is because BT often requires more behavioral data than is currently available, according to JupiterResearch’s Greene. Products or services that require longer purchase cycles and deeper research are able to satiate that prerequisite. As Vanderhook mentions, shopping for cars takes an average of six weeks—plenty of time for marketers to dish out campaigns. To target customers with multiple existing interests, Vanderhook explains that ads will only appear once online behavior in a particular category picks up. In the case of discount carrier Spirit Airlines, a consumer may select a trip from New York to Fort Lauderdale but exit the site before purchasing. If she lands on another travel site within the same advertising network, she will be presented with a traditional banner ad from Spirit reading, for example, “Low fares from New York City,” or “Low fares to Fort Lauderdale.” When consumers do leave a site before completing a transaction, Vanderhook, for one, is not afraid to make sure the consumer knows what benefits your product can offer over the competitor’s. “You hit them at the next site that they’re at, the next site, then the next site—with different messaging to make sure they’re truly understanding what you’re offering,” he says. As much as behavioral targeting focuses on delivering “in the moment,” marketers are advised to know when to throw in the towel. Palmer has frequency caps on her campaigns: After a certain number of campaigns or after a certain time period, ads will no longer be delivered to that user. Persistence has its limits and realistically,“we don’t want to waste any more advertisement on that person,” Palmer says. For marketers who are just beginning 28 to test the waters, Vanderhook suggests first experimenting with “retargeting.” More straightforward, cost-effective, and less intrusive, Vanderhook believes “it’s the single most powerful form of targeting in terms of turning visitors into customers.” When an individual leaves your site and then later appears on a general, non-brand-specific site, marketers can retarget by hitting her with the ads for the specific product again, even outside their ad network. NOT SO FAST… Behavioral targeting is further constrained by practical scalability as marketers strive for deeper granularity. Greene warns that attempting to CUSTOMERS DEMONSTRATE WHAT’S USEFUL— OR NOT USEFUL— TO THEM BASED ON THEIR ACTIONS. person is using legitimate search, and is this type of behavior in accord with our marketing objectives?; 2) How can we find the exact types of behaviors we are looking for?; and 3) How can we spread our message based on these behaviors and make sure it gets to the right consumer? Simply put, companies need to understand themselves and what their own campaign goals are before expecting behavioral targeting to save the day, Greene says. At the same time, he adds, behavioral targeting doesn’t simply deliver on expectations. Marketers should be willing to learn from new and unexpected insights as a result of the technology. During her campaign for Spirit Airlines, Palmer was surprised that the group she logically assumed was the airline’s most popular customer—large families traveling with multiple people—wasn’t. In actuality, consumers were more likely to be married couples without children. Incorporating this knowledge, Palmer says, “will help us open the door to additional advertising opportunities in the future.” ON THE HOME TURF Within the home site, behavioral targeting can work in a slightly different way. An individual is not fed ads based on what the marketer detects to be a single defining identity. Once consumers are on a site, behavioral targeting shifts from displaying relevant ads to relevant content. “Intent is one thing. Interest is one thing. But whether or not the content or product behind [a click] is useful is a completely different thing,” Jia says. He believes that individual behavior is often insufficient to determine if the results are really serving the needs of the user. Baynote’s technology is based on “the wisdom of crowds” (also the title of a book by New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki). Using concepts derived from social psychology, Jia believes a “crowd” (at least seven people who act in the same pattern) can better judge the value of a particular piece of content to that specific group than an expert. www.destinationCRM.com reach every individual with highly targeted campaigns will be very difficult, very time consuming, and very costly. Experts advise partnering with advertising networks—a group of Web sites that want to host ads with advertisers that want to launch ads. According to Vanderhook, ad networks can “provide the scale and efficiencies” unattainable with site-by-site implementations. To judge whether or not your marketing team is prepared to dive into behavioral targeting, Greene proposes three broad, but essential, questions marketers must have the answers to before taking the leap: 1) Can we find enough information to verify that this CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2008

CRM - January 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point Facebook's About-Face On the Scene: Oracle OpenWorld 2007 CRM Market Set to Double Customers, Meet your Makers Required Reading Oh, Behave! Fine-Tuning the Channel Listen Up! The Master Piece Flying High on Customer Service Let's Get Digital The Big Rigs Get Revved Up Putting Asia in Your Pocket Secret of My Success Connect Re:Tooling Pint of View

CRM - January 2008

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