In the real world behavioral targeting is easy. When a woman enters your shop you welcome her, invite her to the area for women products. Based on the interaction with her you modify your tactics to persuade her to buy or try your products.

Just like in the real world, on the web, users interact with you but using different methods: links and forms, instead of language. There is no excuse for you not to use real time behavioral targeting when dealing with your potential customers… and it’s really not that difficult.

I’m talking about free and easy to do implementations. So, here is what you can do:

1. Different messages for different traffic sources

Well, look at your best landing page and see what are the first words that you notice; most probably the main heading. It is just as important as the first words a sales person tells its potential customers. If he would use the same text over and over again his efficiency will surely drop.

Ask your programmers to change the main heading of your landing page with the below script (make sure to change the titles though ). It can be easily modified to provide different titles based on popular keywords and not only referrers.

<h1>
<script type="text/javascript">
function readCookie(name) {
	var nameEQ = name + "=";
	var ca = document.cookie.split(';'); 
	for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) {
		var c = ca[i];
		while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length);
		if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length);
	}
	return null;
}
 
function googleCookieReferrer()
{  
   var feed=readCookie("__utmz");  
   feed=feed.split("|"); 
   feed=feed[0].split("=");
   return feed[1];
}
alert (googleCookieReferrer());
if (googleCookieReferrer() == "(direct)")
{
	document.write("Title for direct visitors or the ones with unknown referrer");
}
else if (googleCookieReferrer() == "domain.com")
{
	document.write("Title for visitors referred by domain.com");
}
else if (googleCookieReferrer() == "google")
{
	document.write("Title for visitors coming from search engines");
}
else document.write("Default Title");
 
</script>
<noscript>Default Title</noscript>
</h1>

The script will provide the same title to users no matter how many times they refresh the page. By the way, it only works if you use Google Analytics.

2. Engaging thank you pages

Thank you pages are really good environments for implementing behavioral targeting methods because they show up just after a user interaction (filling a form) through which you get valuable info about the user.

Cool things you can do on the Thank You pages:

• make users acquaintance with the sales or support person that is responsible for the region where they are from
• let the user know at what events you are attending that are close to him
• invite users to connect to social profiles of your company based on their Job Title or any other relevant information he provides you
• give discount coupons for products depending on the age or sex, if you have it.

Based on the data you are collecting from your visitors, there are tens of ways in which you can use them for engaging your users further. It’s important, though, not to look spammy or scare your visitors away.

The golden rule is to offer them something that, based on the data you just got, you know they will enjoy.

3. Providing relevant info to returning visitors

We tackled this on Wordpress and came out with a plugin that offers returning visitors the article titles that you published since their last visit. You can download the plugin directly from the wordpress.org website . Here is a preview of what it displays on this blog.

The nice part of it is that it’s smart enough to report on its own performance. Using Google Analytics you get to see how many returning visitors interacted with the plug-in and how many of them clicked on the suggested links.

4. Extra mile: Target newsletter subscribers

The extra mile goes for behavioral targeting for getting newsletter subscribers.We are developing a light platform for behavioral targeting in which you will be able to define the segment of visitors you know that are more likely to subscribe to your newsletter and with the help of our platform you get to ask them in a friendly manner, in real time. The testing of it, so far, got us really nice results.

We don’t know yet the release date but we are in the final stage of testing. If you are interested in it and you want to test it before it goes public send us an email and we’ll try to provide you with an account.

The cool part is that it’s going to be free for the first 1000 email subscribers you’ll get.

No matter if you are just about to start a new website and want to track it using the power of Google Analytics or you are one of the early adopters of the powerful web analytics platform, an implementation checklist might be handy. This series of articles comes from my own need in having a clear checklist when starting any new client with web analytics consultancy.

First thing is first. As the owner of the website, make sure you own the analytics data for it. I’ve seen many cases where consultants create the Google Analytics profile on their username and share it with the owner of the website with read only rights. When the website owner wanted to switch the consultant guess what happened?

Yep, losing your analytics data is not cool at all. So, the owner of the website should be the one who creates the Google Analytics profile and shares it with as many consultants he wishes to. You can start by using your already existing Google account or create a new one.

So, here are the checklist chapters:

• Implement the right tracking code and make sure you track your whole website
• Accuracy in tracking traffic sources
• Setting up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking
• Bonus tracking tips and hacks (filters, segments and others)

Here is the short version of the checklist:

Let me know your feedback on it or if you would like me to cover any other aspects as well.

After creating a profile for your website in Google Analytics, the next step is to add the tracking code to your website. Google Analytics uses 2 different tracking codes: the old one, called urchin.js, quite limited in functionality and the new one called ga.js which Google continues to improve to higher standards quite frequently. My recommendation is to use or switch to the ga.js code.

The tracking code is customizable in order to fit the need of any website. It has 3 mandatory elements (the javascript file, the identification code and the tracker) and lots of optional elements. In order to make sure you’ll get accurate tracking when generating your tracking code you need to see what fits your website from the following:

• Your website uses subdomains;
• You use different domains for the same website (using this will also track subdomains);
• You want to track traffic from mobile devices as well (for advanced users).

This is something you want for sure to have it set up right. The main issue here is the Direct Traffic. Why? Well, for Google Analytics, any referrer that he can not understand (from Twitter applications to your RSS links, white-papers or software trials) is labeled automatically as direct traffic.

They say that you shouldn’t focus to get 100% accurate analytics data cause you will not get it. 95% accuracy will do it. However, I’ve seen cases where traffic sources data wasn’t even 30% accurate and that can hurt your business.

So, what is important to know about tracking traffic sources? They need special tagging. Your best friend for this action should be Google URL Builder. The new tags you will add to your links (you don’t need to change anything to your website) will allow Google Analytics to identify the real referrer so it will not go under direct traffic anymore.

Like everybody else, you’ve created your website with a purpose. Measuring how much your website meets your desired purpose is what goal & funnels setup is all about. Google Analytics allows you to define up to 20 goals of the following types:

• URL destination: how many visitors get to a page that confirms you they have finished a desired action (e.g. Thank You for Buying page);
• Time on site: How many visitors spend on your website more than the time you desire them to;
• Pages/Visit: How many visitors get to visit more than the number of pages / visit that you desire them to.

From the 3 types, the first one might give you some head ache, especially if you website is not static HTML, which is very likely. For this you will need to get some RegEX skills. If the thought of this scares you, just ask an analytics consultant to give you a hand (you can always give it a try on an analytics discussion group).

If you do have some RegEX skills, before setting up the goal and funnel just validate it using the method from the ROI Revolution Blog.