How To Take Advantage Of Behavioral Targeting In SEO
Another element that makes behavioral targeting more attractive is the growing ability of companies to capture and record behavior. This is accomplished through the use of cookies, which are small pieces of code that make it possible for companies to track how people behave on the Web without capturing any specific personal information about those people.
The concept is this: a company places a cookie on a user’s hard drive, and then using that cookie tracks what the user searches for online and then where the user travels within those search results. Say that you’re contemplating buying a hybrid car. The first thing that you’re likely to do is research hybrid cars on the Internet. If a search company (or some other organization) is tracking your search movements, they’ll learn that you’re researching hybrid cars.
At this point in the purchasing process, you’re not ready to commit to buying a car, so an advertiser may hold its ads back, not wanting to pay for exposure that results in no conversions. However, the company that placed the cookie on your hard drive can continue to monitor your searches and movements on the Web. Then when you begin to search for the phrase “buying a hybrid car,” or something similar, the search company can alert the advertiser who will then place an ad in front of you. This ensures that you’re in the right frame of mind to see the ad, which means that you’re more likely to click through the ad and reach a conversion goal than other surfers might be.
The truly useful element of behavioral targeting is not that you’re tracking users’ behaviors, but that you’re meeting these potential customers in the place where they are most likely to make a purchase, sign up for your newsletter, fill out a form for more information, or accomplish whatever conversion goal you’ve established.
This search profiling also has the added benefit of allowing you to target your ads much more effec- tively in the buying process. It’s the part of behavioral targeting that seems to draw the most atten- tion. But it allows more than just pre-purchase (or pre-conversion) advertisements. You can also use search profiling as part of behavioral targeting to develop appropriate post-search ads.
Post-search ads appear on the landing pages that you or others have created. These ads are highly targeted to the people who are most likely to click through a PPC ad to reach the landing page. Once there, the ads offer additional, related products and services. These post-search ads are popu- lar because they tend to get more traffic than some other types of advertising, leading to more goal conversions than with other types of advertising.
When behavioral targeting is used, there are several methods by which behavior is evaluated. Those methods include:
■ Expected behavior: Expected behavior is just that what you would expect users to do on a given type of site. For example, if you operate a site that requires users to log in to use the site, even if it’s a free site, you would expect users (who are also qualified sales leads) to fill out the form necessary to sign up for your web-site service. This behavior can some- times allow you to see patterns that you would not have otherwise seen in the behavior of your customers or potential customers.
■ Repetitive behavior: This the same type of behavior from potential customers over and over again. This could include everything from users accessing your pages in a certain. order, to users repeatedly jumping to your site on a specific page or at a specific time. This repetitive behavior makes it much more possible for you to define patterns of behavior that lead to purchasing decisions or to other decisions that lead to the targeted goal conversion.
■ Sequential behavior: This occurs when users sign on to your site and then visit pages or perform actions in a sequential manner. Monitoring sequential behavior helps you to dis- cover established routines that lead to goal conversions. When you know what users are likely to do, because their habits are always the same, you’re more likely to stay one step ahead of your competition.
In addition to these broad categories of behavior evaluation, there are many categories of behavior that are much more specific. Here’s a short list of some of the categories that can be monitored using behavioral targeting:
■ Mobile users
■ Internet power users (those who are always on it)
■ Gamers
■ Auto buyers
■ Home buyers
■ Personal investors
■ Credit card shoppers
■ New/expecting moms
■ Hotel seekers
■ Vacationers
■ Luxury car researchers Sports car researchers
■ SUV researchers
■ Pick-up truck researchers
■Passenger car researchers
■ Movie watchers
Using these methods of behavior monitoring, it’s much easier to target your ads to just the right people at the right time. If you’ve discovered that many people buy from your site, but they first click through some of the articles on your site and you see this in the sequential behavior of sev- eral users, you can begin to infer that if you place additional relevant content (that’s not too sales-y) on your site, then at a certain point in the process users will be more likely to click through your advertisements.
The problem with behavioral targeting is that the companies that conduct professio targeting activities can’t monitor all the different behaviors. The preceding list inclu behaviors that the MSN search engine monitors. However, other search engines migh of these behaviors and not others. And those other search engines might monitor son is not included in that list.
It’s possible to create a system by which you monitor a specific behavior that’s imp Maybe you’re selling a product like plasma screen televisions. And maybe the beh want to monitor are the research phase of the buying cycle and the buying phase cycle. You can monitor both behaviors if you have a clear understanding of what, for. All it takes is the creation of a cookie or set of cookies that will monitor those behaviors.
The key here is determining the searches or page views that are going to lead to the you are trying to accomplish- -in this case, selling a plasma screen television. Ther ence to tell you what behaviors will definitely lead to a sale; however, there are som to what point searchers must reach before they are willing to buy.
For this example, let’s just say that the ideal time to place your ad in front of them is returned to the Internet for a second time to research plasma screen televisions. At can place your ad in front of these searchers, and the ad is more likely to result in a To track these movements, you would need cookies to track the specific behavior th mined leads to goal conversion, as well as the pages that the potential customers an may even want to include a cookie that helps you to exclude site visitors who have the goal conversion that you’ve established.
Additionally, your web site will need the capability to read these cookies and then right content to the user, based on the contents of those cookies. It’s a complicated the right web designer, it’s a very doable one. And it really shouldn’t be all that expensive.
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