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.
    

Every search engine marketer knows it is important to acquire incoming links to prominent pages on websites to help build the authority of the website in the search engines perspective. There are many websites online that I personally wouldn’t want to give a link too; whether it be I think their website is no good and I don’t want to expose my web audience to the webpage or there may be little value in the connection between the two sites and therefore I’d decline the linking opportunity.  As the search engine algorithms adjust and stabilize it is evident that good incoming links are going to play a vital role in ranking website’s authoritativeness for quite some time.

So, how do I get reputable trustworthy sites to link to me?

In the search engine marketing industry we have a name for the art of making it appear attractive to link to a particular website; we call it link baiting.

“Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Attempts to create link bait are frequently employed in the overall task of search engine optimization. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “… interesting enough to catch people’s attention.” Typically, users on bulletin boards, newsgroups, social networking websites, or blogs place a link to a website in some copy that further encourages another member or visitor to click. It can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature. ” Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_bait

Traditionally link baiting has been a part of a PR campaign and rarely do people use the permanent content on their site to try to attract incoming links. It is important to remember that the ultimate goal of an incoming link is to get the web visitor and search engine to your website for a successful and positive experience. Good content is the key to becoming as relevant as possible for a specific search keyword so it makes sense that good content would also be key for the other websites to link to your website.

A few techniques for successful link baiting with new content are:

1. Tools: Offer industry related tools to your audience and other websites will be more attracted to providing  a link back to your site. The old saying from the movie “Field of Dreams” applies here: “If you build it, they will come”

2. Articles: Creating a library of well-thought articles based around topics your audience is searching for is a sure-fire way to gain positive exposure and attract new sites to provide you an incoming link.

3. Humor: Everyone likes something humorous, especially when they can connect with the subject matter. If the opportunity arises to add some humor to your content it will go a long way. I’m not saying to go hire George Carlin to write all your content but if a nice blend of humor that is relevant can be worked into the content - other sites will be more attracted to providing your site an incoming link.

In recent months there has been a lot of buzz in the search engine marketing industry about the possibility that Google and other search engines might be tracking paid links to incoming sites and placing negative weight on these links in the search algorithm. Well, to all you link gurus out there, this may come as great or horrible news; but it’s true - Google has added paid link tracking to their webmaster tools package. This doesn’t mean they have not been tracking these links for quite sometime and have just now decided to share the results with website owners but it does mean they are taking the time to track these links so you should take your time in selecting where your site should be linked from - especially when you are willing to pay for the link.

Matt Cutts of Google’s anti-spam team has offered some guidelines for evaluating paid links: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070514-153234.

Online Community Optimization is a method of optimizing a website so they can be easily located on online community websites.  It is crucial for your website to be located where your searchers are spending their time. As the search industry evolves and Search Engine Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, and Social Media Optimization become the main focuses of the Internet marketing movement - it is important not to neglect the thousand’s of community sites on the web that allow users to communicate with one another which in-turn creates a peer-to-peer recommendation service for new products and services.

One might ask, what is the difference between ‘Word-of-Mouth’ marketing and Online Community Optimization? Traditionally Word-of-Mouth marketing techniques are performed offline; as peers share an experience they have had with a product or service with others in an effort to be successful in spreading a positive perception of the product or service at hand.

With the emergence of niche online communities in the past few years, it has become simpler to communicate this message to others. Online communities offer a place for people to share experiences with other people that are actually interested in hearing about those experiences. With all this discussion taking place on the internet it was inevitable that the search engines would eventually start to notice all this chatter about certain products or services and slowly integrate that into their algorithms. Whether the search engines are ranking the community site above yours in a search result page or they provide a place for your prospective customer to hear about your offering – there are many benefits from Online Community Optimization.

*This technique was coined by Seth Worby, Director of Search Engine Marketing for Verndale Corporation.

The service offering: Online Community Optimization is a unique service offering only offered by Verndale. Please Contact us for more information regarding Online Community Optimization.

Link Acquisition: Acquiring inbound links is a technique used by search engine marketers because there are many benefits from a successful inbound link. The first benefit of an inbound link is that the search engines put a fair amount of emphasis on inbound links and use link popularity as a way of considering sites authorities within an industry. Another major benefit of link acquisition is that some of the sites that have outbound links may rank well in the search engines or have a fair amount of regular traffic. These sites can act as intermediaries and open the doors of a website to traffic it otherwise would not have known.