What is Behavioral Targeting?
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:
- Adknowledge (http://www.adknowledge.com)
- Tacoda (http://www.tacoda.com)
- Revenue Science (http://www.revenuescience.com)
Important Tips When Behavioral Targeting
- Always be sure to have a defined objective at the beginning of the project
- Know your target audience
- Understand the possible benefits from a behavioral targeting campaign
- Monitor the progress of your campaign to aid in making better decisions
- 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.
Why Competitive Research is Important for Search Marketing
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:
What is a Robots.txt File?
A Robots.txt file is simply a file that is placed on a website’s server with the intention of telling the search engine spiders not to crawl and index pages or sections of a website that would be otherwise publicly viewable.
A few suggested ways to use a Robots.txt file are:
1. To block the search engines from indexing an entire site.
2. Prevent specific sections of a website to be blocked from being indexed.
3. To communicate specific indexing instructions to individual search engines.
Does My Site Need a Robots.txt File?
With the emergence of so many search engines over the past decade, Robots.txt file have become standard protocol for search engine spiders to attempt to locate and view when they first arrive at a website. Search engine spiders are trained to start their crawl looking for the Robots.txt file; this allows the spiders to know which pages to index and which pages should be disallowed from being indexed. Even though your site may not have any pages that you would currently want blocked from being publicly viewable it is still a recommended best search engine optimization practice to include a Robots.txt file on the root folder of your site. It will act as an invitation with the search engines to successfully communicate the message to crawl all the pages on your site.
Some reasons why you may want to exclude spiders from your site:
1. The website is still in development and you do not want your unfinished work to be found by the public.
2. The information presented on your page only pertains to your specific audience once they have arrived at your site and is of no interest to an outside viewer
3. Certain common pages such as: Thank You pages, Privacy Policies, Etc. are prime candidates to be excluded from the search engine indexes because there is no benefit for a web visitor to enter the website onto them.
4. You may want to exclude your site from specific search engines entirely; whether it be because you do not believe in that search engines procedures or it is a known bot that collects data you do not want shared (i.e.: email addresses)
5. If doorway pages are used on your site (we highly recommend not using them) you may want to exclude specific search engine spiders from viewing them as they will have a negative impact on your optimization efforts on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
Creating a Robots.txt File
A Robots.txt file is simple to create. It can be created right in Notepad or any text editor. Once it is created it needs to be uploaded to the root folder of your website. Each entry in a Robots.txt file only contains two lines of text.
Layout for a Robots.txt file:
User-Agent: [Spider or Bot name]
Disallow: [Directory or File Name]
Examples of Robots.txt Files:
1. Exclude file or directory from a specific search engine spider:
User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /section/examplefile.htm
2. Exclude a specific section of a website from every search engine spider and bot:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /examplesection/
3. Allow spiders to index the entire site:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
4. Disallow spiders from indexing any part of the website:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Where do Searchers Search?
Most people have one search engine they likely go to when performing a search to find information; whether it be Google, Yahoo, or a less-popular search engine everyone has their own preference. There are thousand’s of search engines available online today; some even only operate in one specific country or region – others are international and can be used to search almost anything – than there are the search engines created to help people compare products and services. Whatever you are searching for there is always more options than one might think of when deciding where to perform that search.
Throughout the years each search engine that has come and gone (yes – I remember the AltaVista days) has had to try to position themselves in the marketplace to compete for the growing number of searches that take place each year. Very few companies have been successful in surviving the technological revolution, otherwise known as the emergence of the internet and others have thrived on the direct traffic control they can provide for websites. There is a balance that must take place when creating and positioning a website and decisions need to be made by the management of each search engine as to what their position is going to be in the market.
Yahoo decided years ago to start a network of published content and to provide services to users such as Fantasy Sports, Weather, and News. While the other major search engine and their direct competitor Google decided to create a clean site, without any clutter on the homepage, and a simple white background. So why has Google dominated the search engine landscape over the past few years – and why are they showing no signs of slowing down?
Google’s algorithm for returning organic search results is considered to be the most sophisticated on the market today and they have made substantial investments over the years to maintain their presence as the leader in providing the most relevant results for specific searches. The technique Google adopted early on was providing people with the most relevant results and then converting them into loyal Google users. This strategy has evolved from its original conception but the backbone of Google’s business and how they maintain themselves as the leader in the marketplace is still by providing user’s what they are looking for.
Kinds of Search Results
There are two primary kinds of search results that search engines, such as: Google, Yahoo, and MSN display to the end user who has performed the search. The first type of search result is called an organic result and the other major result returned by search engines is called a paid result.
An Organic result, is also referred to as a natural result, organic results are the reason search engines are as powerful as they are today. An organic result returns the best possible page for a search query based on many on-site and off-site factors. Each major search engine has created their own algorithm to rank websites and match them up with specific keywords a searcher may type into a search query. Over 60% of searchers are likely to click on an organic search result when reaching a search engine result page (SERP). Searchers have learned to trust and accept the organic results as the most relevant source on a topic; it is the mission of the major search engines to provide people with the most relevant and trustworthy result for each search that takes place. The practice of having your website come up high in the organic search result pages is called Search Engine Optimization; and should be part of every online marketing strategy for any website.
The second type of search result is called a paid result. If you have ever wondered how the Google stock got to be over $500 a share in just a few short years; paid results is the reason why. Paid results are a revenue generating activity for the search engines that allows website owners and marketers to place their website on the first page of search engine result pages (SERP) for specific search terms by simply paying for it. This practice is called Pay-Per-Click advertising and is a method of advertising that involves an investment of both money and time from a website owner. It is recommended to cohesively use a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign to complement your Search Engine Optimization Efforts.