Online behavior is not offline behavior done online. This is what Joseph Carrabis explains with a scientific rigour in his book: Reading Virtual Minds, Volume I. He takes the reader through a journey from the basics of human behavior and communication to how do users interact with the online world. Once the scientific basis is understood he takes the reader through a set of experiments and case studies on how online behavioral targeting can be used for increasing performance

What I loved the most about the book is that it comes with a scientific approach towards web analytics and behavioral targeting. On one side, Joseph has a strong background in sociology, anthropology, psychology and many other interconnected sciences. On the other side he loves the web. It was just a matter of time before putting them together (around 15 years of research, actually). The Internet is a very complex communication medium. He  really treats it as such.

The book is mind blowing. At every page you find yourself saying out loud “Ohh Common, that can’t be real!” just that at the next page everything is explained and becomes common sense. Imagine this: the behavioral targeting software he built manages to identify if a user who logs in to his account really is him or is it somebody else having access to his login credentials based only by the the way the user interacted with the website. What about managing to identify the field of interest of the visitors just by the way they browsing through a website. Mind blowing, I tell you.

When it comes to behavioral targeting, I believe in simple solutions and to simple solutions you get by asking the right questions.

The question: If you could ask one question to a certain segment of traffic, what segment would you choose and what question would it be? The guests: Avinash Kaushik, Joseph Carrabis and Stephane Hamel, people I look way up to when it comes to web analytics brain set. Here is how they would answer the above question:

Avinash Kaushik

Segment: The segment where I am spending the most money acquiring traffic.

Question: Why were you not able to complete your task on our website today?

(Author’s note) I love Avinash’s “simple solution – rich in value” approach. Implementing his suggestion is almost piece of cake to do with some minor help from your development team; the value you can get out of this implementation, priceless .

ReadWriteWeb posted today a great video made by IBM, called “The Internet of Things”. Here is the video:

Understanding who your newsletter subscribers are, is a must. The simple fact that they subscribed it means that they are interested, they care, they want to know more about you. If your newsletter quality will raise to their expectations, it will be much easier to convert them from subscribers to clients.

So, who subscribes to your newsletter?

In order to make a profile of the visitors who subscribe to your newsletter, first add a Goal to your Google Analytics implementation. A goal would be the URL of the page that says “Thank you for subscribing”. In case you use double opt-in, which I highly recommend, it is the URL address of the page that confirms the subscription.

Here is how your goal setup should look like:

Creating a Google Analytics Goal for newsletter subscribing

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.