Archive for the ‘Behavioral Targeting’ Category
Monday, 1 February, 2010
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.
Who are your Newsletter Subscribers?
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
Gather data for one or 2 weeks (or until you have at least 100 new subscribers) and than you can run deep into profiling the newsletter subscribers. It will help you better understand the behavior of your visitors and come up with strategies to increase your subscribers list (without spamming that is).
Define a new segment for newsletter subscribers
In case you are not familiar with user segments in Google Analytics, take a look at this video tutorial. Here is how your new segment should look like (that is if your Goal for newsletter subscribers is defined as Goal 1):
Defining a segment for newsletter subscribers
Now, all you need to do is get back to your Analytics data, apply the newly created segment and see what you find out about the people who subscribe to your newsletter. Try to answer the following questions:
How much potential are you wasting?
After understanding your newsletter subscribers, the next step would be to see how many visitors of your website have the same behavior with your newsletter subscribers. In other words, how many people are most likely to become subscribers.
Back to the drawing board (that is the segment creating page). Generate a new segment that would define the behavior of your subscribed users. Let’s say the conclusion you get from the above study is that your newsletter subscribers are new users that come mostly from search engines and visit at least 4 pages a session. Create a segment for it and apply it to your website data.
Now you have the number of visitors that subscribe to your newsletter and the number of visitors that are most likely to subscribe. Check out the conversion rate from one to the other? Let’s improve on that.
The next best thing would be to act on it
In case you use MailChimp for delivering your newsletter, we have a free solution for you. Today we have just launched a public limited edition of our real time behavioral targeting platform, PadiAct. After defining your segment of visitors who are most likely to subscribe to your newsletter, using PadiAct, you can ask these visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. It can and it will skyrocket your subscribing rate. Here is how it has worked for one of our clients.
In case you don’t use MailChimp but you are still very interested in making this work for you as well, drop us a message and we’ll see what can be done.