Behavioral Targeting is a method of advertising used by online marketers to increase the effectiveness of their online marketing campaigns. Behavioral targeting allows marketers to deliver a relevant branded message to a specific target audience.  The concept behind this marketing technique is to track an internet user’s behavior and then return the most relevant advertisement. If delivered properly, behavioral targeting can provide a medium for marketing online that yields a high click-through-rate and ultimately increase not only the conversion rate but also the number of conversions (sales).

Who Should Do Behavioral Targeting?

Typically behavioral targeting has been used by large companies and organizations to attempt to reach out to a greater potential audience, but more recently a fair amount of small companies are seeing great success from running behavioral targeted online campaigns.

Behavioral targeting offers large and small businesses alike another avenue to reach their potential audience directly. The integration of technology with the science of understanding a user’s clickstream (clickstream is the recording of what a computer user clicks on while web browsing or using a personal computer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickstream) and search patterns has allowed publishing networks to offer advertisers the phenomenon of being able to serve an advertisement directly to a primed consumer.

What are the Benefits of Behavioral Targeting?As with any marketing initiative whether it is online or offline the end goal is to generate more conversions. When incorporating behavioral targeting as a marketing technique into your overall online marketing strategy a marketer can expect to attract three types of visitors: 

• Existing customer retention: If behavioral targeting is integrated with an organizations CRM (customer relationship management), the organization can expect to see conversions increase due to the direct traffic control behavioral targeting offers. Traditional methods of communicating with existing clients do not allow marketers to individualize marketing materials with the precision behavioral targeting can. 
• Brand awareness: Large companies are more likely to initiate a behavioral targeted marketing campaign for reasons of brand awareness than small companies. Larger companies use this technique of marketing to get their name in front of their potential audience as much as possible. The end goal of these advertisements is not necessarily to drive the conversion that instant but yet to get the potential consumer to be aware of the company or organizations existence.
• New customer acquisition: This benefit of behavioral targeting allows for the easiest ROI tracking. As with many marketing initiatives the objective of this approach is drive an immediate conversion (sale) from consumers who are already looking in your industry’s landscape but previously did not know your organization existed.

Who Offers Behavioral Targeting?

Throughout the past decade many companies have come and gone that claim to offer behavioral targeting marketing and only a few have survived the rigors of the online marketing industry. We suggest checking out the following service offerings, if you are interested in starting a behavioral targeting marketing campaign:

1. Adknowledge (http://www.adknowledge.com)
2. Tacoda (http://www.tacoda.com)
3. Revenue Science (http://www.revenuescience.com)

Important Tips When Behavioral Targeting

1. Always be sure to have a defined objective at the beginning of the project
2. Know your target audience
3. Understand the possible benefits from a behavioral targeting campaign
4. Monitor the progress of your campaign to aid in making better decisions
5. Ask yourself if this marketing technique is right for your business? If so, start slow and work your way to a more comprehensive campaign once you have proven ROI.
    

When starting any online marketing initiative it is vital for marketers to review the level of competition in the search landscape and analyze what tactics specific competitors are deploying. With many ways of advertising online, ranging from organic search engine optimization to sponsoring sections of industry relevant websites it is in a search marketers best interest to take the time necessary to review the competition before making important decisions about where to allocate resources.

As the landscape of business evolves and companies and organizations continue to push more and more business through online channels, a simple competitive research technique that we all learned in Marketing 101 can still apply here; SWOT Analysis. SWOT Analysis stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The goal of any marketer analyzing competition whether the competition be offline or online is too determine the position that should be obtained for your business or organization in that medium.

What is SWOT Analysis?

SWOT Analysis, is a method of strategic planning that evaluates the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats connected to a project, business venture or marketing initiative. SWOT Analysis includes determining the objective of the project, business venture or marketing initiative as well as researching the internal and external factors that are going to influence the objective. 

• Strengths: characteristics of the business or organization that will be helpful to achieving the objective.
• Weaknesses: aspects of the business or organization that can be detrimental to achieving the objective.
• Opportunities: external factors that can be helpful to achieving the objective.
• Threats: external factors that can be harmful to achieving the objective.

For more information on SWOT Analysis, please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swot_analysis

How Many Competitors Should I Analyze?

It is important to analyze a broad-sampling of the competition within the search landscape so a better understanding of what tactics are successful and what tactics are failing can be determined. The recommended amount of competitors that should be analyzed depends on the competitive nature of the industry a specific website is competing in; we always recommend to review at least five other industry related websites before starting an online marketing campaign.

How do I perform Competitive Research for Search Marketing?

Every search engine marketing professional uses different tools to scour the Internet for information about their competition. There are literally hundreds of tactics that can be correlated to online success for a specific website, so it is crucial to narrow a competitive analysis to certain key components of the campaign to ensure that the proper steps are taken without wasting valuable time and money.

What are some recommended things to look for when analyzing a competitor’s website?

• Review the current link popularity of each competitor
• Review how well the competition is indexed throughout each search engine
• Analyze the keyword density on your competitor’s sites
• Track their current organic search rankings
• Determine who in the industry conducts a Pay-Per-Click campaign

Some tools we suggest for doing search marketing competitive research:

• http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
• http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool
• http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
• http://www.seologs.com/keyword-difficulty.html
• http://www.urltrends.com

Many search engine users do not realize that the search box within each search engine allows for shortcuts to be entered when performing a search to aid in finding the information a user is looking for more efficiently. Below is a list of Google shortcuts that you can incorporate into your everyday searching (If we have left any out please comment and we will be sure to add it to the list. Thanks!)

Google Search Shortcuts:

For more information on Google search shortcuts, please visit: http://www.google.com/help/features.html.

An XML Sitemap is used to communicate to search engines the URLs that exist on a website and that are available for crawling. The communication that takes place between a website and the search engine is called ’sitemap protocol’ and it is typically in XML format. The sitemap protocol was written in such a way that it would allow for scalability so it can accommodate sites of any size. XML Sitemaps also allow websites to share information about each specific URL on a website; enabling the search engines to more accurately crawl each page on a website.

Information Communicated to Search Engines through an XML Sitemap:

1. When the URL was last updated
2. How often the URL changes
3. How important the URL is in relation to other URLs on the site

For more information please visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemap_Protocol