Five Tips for Making the Most of Onsite Behavioral Targeting

Imagine yourself as the owner of a small shop.  You’re modestly successful, but traffic in and out of your store is light enough that you have time to speak with everyone who comes through the door.  You can observe customers as they browse.  You can ask them why they picked up one product rather than another.  You can note which displays catch their attention and which are ignored.  A business tuned into customer behavior in this way would not stay small for long.  So how does the owner of a larger business, or an Internet-based one, target customer behavior for better return on investment?  Web-based behavioral targeting with self-learning algorithms enables these businesses to create the most welcoming, enticing destination for visitors, ultimately engaging them more deeply in the site.  

Onsite behavioral targeting solutions collect and use hundreds of anonymous data points, and self-learning algorithms can draw out the most pertinent attributes for each visitor, track activity in real time and record and cluster onsite activities. The end results are the same ones you might see if you had the time and resources to speak directly with each and every customer: increased loyalty, engagement and revenue. 

The promises of behavioral targeting are great, but to ensure they are fulfilled, there are several important steps you should take.

1. Plan ahead. Onsite behavioral targeting is a powerful solution for increasing the ROI of your website efforts, but you shouldn’t jump into it without some pre-planning.  Before you start running behavioral targeting on your site, spend some time designing your approach and clarifying your goals. 
2. Carefully select pages for behavioral targeting optimization.  Seek out pages with diverse user traffic and numerous navigation routes.  Over time, behavioral targeting will guide each user to the best location.  High-traffic, high-visibility pages are good choices, as are spots on your site where users select their next destination, such as a landing page, homepage promotion banner or category page.
3. Test drive lots of ideas.  Don’t skip the ones that seem a bit crazy.  Behavioral targeting lets you try out diverse variations on the same offerings, so free yourself to think outside of the norm.  Select the products, services, promotions or content you wish to feature on your site and have some fun with different campaign options. When you offer a wide variety of options, behavioral targeting is much more effective in serving relevant content to visitors.
4. Identify your target audiences. Determine the audience segments to which you will serve personalized content and choose which will view the optimization.  Keep in mind, though, that if you segment, you limit the behavioral targeting engine from learning about other parts of your traffic, reducing the overall effectiveness of the optimization. Use segmenting only when the participating offerings are displayed to a restricted audience, such as unique content for new and returning visitors.
5. Take advantage of simulation tools.  After all, not all surprises are welcome. Simulation tools enable you to preview your content variations and check out how the different offerings work on your page before you actually run them on your live site.  

Onsite behavioral targeting can be extremely useful in determining customers’ interests. The amount of learning time personalization engines require is dependent on the quantity of traffic, as well as the diversity of offerings and segments.  But as the technology learns your visitors’ behavior, it will fine-tune matches between promotions and visitors and produce better results.  Using these analytic and predictive capabilities enables you to engage your visitors as effectively, and more easily, than if you were able to observe each of them in person.