Wednesday

Actions speak louder than words

Behavioural targeting ( BT ) - While sales optimisation fulfils maximising the present , BT assists in ensuring your messages are being played on complimentary areas on the web. By building a profile of the overall user browsing behaviour it is possible to piece together the overall story of the consumer – the web is still a disjointed medium with many who execute via the medium , search based marketing activity pays testimony to peoples efforts to try and join everything together.

Taking for example a potential buyers visit to mother care online, with interest in making car seats would , for example prompt a SUV commercial from ford, obvious right ? ( even better if the precursor to this was last week was indeed site visit to Ford for such a vehicle ).


Building a knowledge or profile from browsing habits is nothing new, indeed this was part of the appeal to advertisers and media alike of the internet – this ability to track and log our habits , interests and movements allow them to target.

In the early days many protested to this being a blatant invasion of privacy , however getting permission in the begining is key.

People will surrender relevant and valuable information about themselves so long as there is a benefit involved in this and future engagements – they also have to trust it will not be passed to third parties, it moves us towards profile based marketing – with us the buyer , storing a central profile containing such items as phone contracts, home and car insurance – items which have a regular renewal cycle. These then are triggered into the correct buying aggregators / bid systems to automatically each year , at the right time , go and seek offers on my behalf.

We have two offers here, the maximisation of the here and now web browser, through BT we as marketers can ensure relevance and context to the more present interest of people, gaining and improved response and user satisfaction, combined with offered information from the buyers ensuring each web engagement is a profitable one ( hopefully leaving more time for the higher value items to be investigated )

A classic example of how not to go about this task would be the recent incident involving AOL , which not only directly impacted the companies reputation and carriers of senior people within the group, but the inference of Google’s business practises came into question.

Google example taken from Guardian :

Gmail is indexed, your searches are indexed, if you have blog – again this is tied back and indexed to you – Google talk and also the ability to show people what music you are playing – therefore activities which are not directly linked to your interactions within the Google realm. This combined with behavioural information from your previous current web engagements makes for an extremely compelling profiling analysis to take place which is completely natural and unbiased in its results.

If users are asked a subset of questions in a structured manner, most will lie in some fashion , or fit the answers to how they think they should be answered – the old adage of actions speak louder than words relay comes into play here.


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