Online behavior is not offline behavior done online

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.

While many web analytics and behavioral targeting books out there are rather about cookies, numbers and statistics, for Joseph everything is about people. That’s why this book was so different than anything I have read so far.

Another thing that strikes about the book are the reviews that come from people like Jim Sterne, Anil Batra, Bryan Eisenberg, Robbin Steif and Angie Brown. These guys are worldwide top notch when it comes to web communication and analytics.

How come the book is not in top 10 web marketing best sellers on Amazon, you might ask. I really have no idea as it really should be there. The only explanation I can find is that the book is some sort of the “Ace in the sleeve” for many top marketers. It’s part of their secret of why they are so good at what they do. I don’t like cheating in poker (unless I am the only one doing it ) so I highly recommend this book to everybody. It will put some science facts in your work.

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 .

Joseph Carrabis

I’ve had about a day to think of this and my response hasn’t changed (and it’s probably NextStageish): I would direct my question to the segment that doesn’t achieve the site goal (bounces, non-conversions, …) and ask them “Is there anything we could do to help you achieve your goal on the site?”

In most cases the visitor percentage goaling/converting is small (just checked FireClick. Conversions are 4.2% and cart abandonment is just over 70%). These numbers are extremely consistent with NextStage research and are due to site designs/topologies/… not being designed for the majority audience (except by accident, usually). These numbers (4.2%, 70%) demonstrate a site’s de facto audience. They’ll complete a goal/convert regardless.

I should point out that I’ve written elsewhere that NextStage has a 19% bounce rate, a just over 75% conversion rate and a cart abandonment rate of 3.7%. The low numbers experienced by other sites don’t surprise me because few sites are designed to capture the majority of their visiting audience.

Essentially these sites don’t ask visitors “Is there anything we could do to help you achieve your goal on the site?” and note that I’m asking the visitors how to achieve their goals while on the site, not how to get them to achieve the site’s goals for visitors.

Stephane Hamel

Some people would go through extensive scientific explanation or rely on black-magic to uncover the über segment that will gratify any business with triple digit conversion rate improvements. If I could only segment by one metric, that would be Recency – how long ago you came to the site, or purchased, or did something worthwhile for my business. Time and time again Recency has proven to be the best predictor of future behavior. In our field, Jim Novo has been a proponent of this metric and this has been studied in psychology, marketing, behavioral science, database marketing, etc.

Part of the RFM segmentation model (Recency, Frequency, Monetary), Recency would be a better predictor of behavior than any other metric. Think of it, just with this metric you can also segment new vs repeat visitors, prospects and long-time customers, unqualified visitors vs advocates, etc. Segmenting by Google search terms are interesting, doing it by social media source is cool, but nothing beats Recency. Philip Kotler, the gold standard in marketing management, sums it up nicely: “Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately it takes a lifetime to master”… Have you checked your recency metric recently?

Now, the question I would ask returning visitors is very simple: What is your purpose of visit. Knowing that specific piece of qualitative info would allow me to see if/how I can help achieve their goal – and mine!

My Take

I love all 3 answers, and to prove it, I am going to implement them all. I’ll let you know the results as soon as I will have some.

I like Avinash’s answer cause it’s so plain simple to do and results can be very helpful. I love Joseph’s answer cause I don’t think you can get a better way to learn on how to optimize a conversion process; it really can’t get more relevant than that. I love Stephane’s answer because when visitors return over and over again to your website you can bet they have a good reason for it. You’d better find it out.

Your take now

If you could ask one question to a certain segment of traffic, what segment would you choose and what question would it be?

Give us your best shots and we’ll choose the ones we can accomplish and offer their implementations for your website, free of charge.

How will the internet of things work?

For the internet of things and the artificial intelligence that will be part of it, the main input will be the user behavior.

I believe that behavioral targeting and, even further, behavioral intelligence, are going to be integrated in each and every communication system, be it a web page, a social network, a web application or the advanced things the movie is talking about.

Between a system that offers you what you expect and a system that offers you what it wants, the first will always prevail.

What about today?

There is still a lot of work to be put in behavioral targeting. The online advertising industry has barely got a grasp on it. However, there are free basic and simple things one can do and experiment with it, even as we speak. It’s an issue of business mentality rather than technology.

Innovations like Attention Profiling Mark-up Language will expand and make behavioral targeting  more and more accessible. Google seems to already be using it. Other big corporations are most likely already experimenting with it.

So, what do you think of it? How much of your strategy integrates behavioral targeting?

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

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:

• Are they mostly new or returning visitors (Dashboard > Visitors > New vs Returning)
• How many pages and how much time do they spend on the website before subscribing (Dashboard > Visitors > Visitor Trending)
• What are the pages that are most persuasive in convincing users to subscribe ($index metric in Dashboard > Content > Top content)
• What are the most common traffic sources for the visitors that decide to subscribe (Dashboard > Traffic Sources)

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.

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.