Web analytics isn’t all about crunching the numbers to produce nice-looking graphs. Any analytics strategy is about ROI, and to achieve that you’ve got to start thinking about customers and predict how they think.
Behavioral targeting systems use self-adjusting, predictive models to select visitor treatments. There are dozens of products on the market that specialize in onsite targeting, observing visitor behavior and building statistical models that predict the next most likely actions. Once a model is ready, they can use its predictions to select related content, which could be ads, offers, search results or replies to service questions. Sometimes, the systems run structured test that different choices to different visitors, but usually they present the same options to all visitors and build their models from the results.
Analyze that
As with other web analysis tools, such as click or spending analysis, behavioral targeting systems rely on a combination of current behavior and persistent cookies to gather visitor data. The key to good behavioral targeting is the right data. Analysts will tell you it’s not about data mining, or amassing data, but on focusing a collection of high-value data points. The key, then, is finding them. What pages website visitors click on and where they go from those pages indicates some interest in buying products related to the topics that they click on. Often, this information is not just gleaned from one visit, but repeat visits. Over time, marketers can determine the likelihood that the customer is on a specific trajectory, from “investigate” to “purchase”.
Behavioral targeting programs can collect any information available to the system, from visitor source to browser type to the sequence of pages just visited. Because their modeling is fully automated, they can consider hundreds or variables for their models rather than the handful that can be managed manually in traffic analysis or version testing. The behavioral targeting models continue to learn over time, so predictions adjust automatically as user behaviors change. Behavioral targeting system use similar statistical methods to other types of automated modeling systems. Again, though, the data volume and acquisition speed of the web requires specialized treatment, so be prepared, and ensure you have the right people in place to “decode” the crucial data that you’ve be gathering.