3 behavioral targeting actions you can do on your website, today

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.