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This post was originally posted in July 2009. I am updating it again as this is a topic that I get asked a lot lately and I have also recently launched a new course on the topic. In the course I cover Retargeting Fundamentals and how to do retargting on Facebook . (purchase course on Udemy  or on Global Analytics Academy ) and will be releasing the one on Google soon. According to Wikipedia Behavioral retargeting (also known as behavioral search retargeting, or simply, retargeting ) is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous Internet actions that did not in the past result in a conversion. How does it work? You visit a site, look at some products, maybe add some of the products to the shopping cart but then decide not to buy them because you need some more time to think about it. You close your browser and are done for the day. Next morning you go back to your computer and browse to a news site. As the page of t...

Today I came across an article by Isaac Weisberg, titled Unintended Consequences of Targeting: Less Information, Less Serendipity – Part I . In this article Isaac argues that online personalization limits the exposure of information to the individuals. I agree that current personalization practices are very limited though it is more of an issue with the marketers engaged in personalization than with the technology. ( Note: Retargeting , Behavioral Targeting , on-site recommendations, customized emails etc. are all different forms of personalization). So it is not Personalization that limits the flow of information but it is the people engaged in Personalization. The purpose of personalization is to provide information that is relevant to an individual and in order to do so you will eliminate a lot of information that the person is not likely to be interested in. However that does not mean that the person cannot be exposed to new information with the personalization. The issue is tha...

Yesterday I came across an article on eMarketer that showed that Behavioral Targeting brings clear benefits to publishers . However when consumers are asked about Behavioral Targeting or data collections by websites they seem to dislike it. It is clear from the first chart that behavioral targeting is working for everybody i.e. publishers, advertisers and consumers. If it were not working for consumers then publishers would not charge premium for it and advertisers would not pay premium for it. So why are consumers so concerned?  As I have stated before the biggest issue seems to the lack of consumer education and the perception of behavioral targeting . Anybody will get concerned if you tell them that the websites are collecting too much personal information about them. The issue here is how the question is framed and the context it is posed in. If asked in a different way the responses would be different than shown in the chart above. Let’s see how the answer will differ based...

Past weekend, WSJ published a story titled Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets on online tracking and advertising ( behavioral targeting ). It appears to me that the author of this article is either confused between malware and cookies is or she is just doing what she is supposed to do to sell the story i.e. using words that instill fear in people. The article projects any tracking, business and advertisers do to serve relevant ads or personalize the users experience on web, as malicious. Businesses have been trying to understand consumer preferences and then make personalized recommendations ever since the humans existed. We do it offline all the time. So how is online tracking for the same purpose malicious? My dad used to run his clothing store in India, way before internet existed. He used to gather all the information (in his brain) about consumers browsing and purchase behavior to make personalized recommendation to existing customers and new customers. He used all that informat...

Shoppers, via their online and offline actions, provide a ton of information to the marketers. Smart marketers can and should leverage this information to understand shoppers motivations and needs to create a better relationship with the shoppers and ultimately make more money for their organizations. Every customer touch point is a goldmine of data. It starts from the keywords that shoppers use to arrive to your site, the links that they click on to get to your site (and the sites they visited before they came to your site), clicks on emails, clicks on banners, every click and every action on your site, purchases etc.. All these actions by the shopper provides you with the information that you can use to follow the shoppers. What does following the shopper mean? In simple terms, following the shopper (visitor) essentially means using the shoppers behavioral data to understand the shoppers’ needs and then serving them with personalized ads/messages/offers , wherever you see them onlin...

The Web is all about choices and Analytics is all about understanding the choices by analyzing the behavior patterns: Who are my right customers? Why do they make the choices that they do? What opportunities are worth chasing? What features will provide the most value? What is the best time-to-market, and most important which customers are most important. While it’s difficult to make ALL the right choices, one has to make most of them right for the campaign, site, or product to succeed. Enter Personas This is a must have tool for marketers for helping them make the right choices. Personas is essentially a technique for capturing the important learning(s) from analyzing users and customers and identifying and understanding the different types of people who use the site. It is a description of an imaginary but very plausible user that “personifies” these traits. The three key traits which personas help identify are: Behavior, Attitudes, Goals. How can Personas Help Rallying – Personas c...

Retargeting or Remarketing is way to put your ad in front of the people who have been to your site before and are likely to respond to you ads and offers. Retargeting via Google Adwords Retargeting is not new, I have been writing about it since 2006 and working in this area since 2003 . Recently, Google Remarketing, via adwords, has brought retargeting to the masses . Though, in my opinion, Google has not done a good job in educating advertiser on how to effectively engage in retargeting. To start with, Google says, you should retarget every visitor who came to your site. That is a wrong approach and I highly discourage it. As you read through this post , you will know my reasoning behind it. You have to understand remarketing to effectively use it. I am listing 5 questions that you should ask before you put that JavaScript code to start remarketing. 5 questions to ask before starting a Retargeting Campaign What is the purpose of this retargeting campaign? This is first question you s...

Last week I wrote about a browser plug-in that will allow people to opt-out of the Google Analytics cookie . The release of this plug-in seems to be a proactive step towards another announcement. Eric Peterson, on his blog, voiced his opinion on why Google is rolling out this plug-in . I think Eric has a point in his post about Google trying to make a push into Federal Government web sites and this roll out is a check-box to satisfy the needs of privacy advocates. However, I am still not entirely clear on what Google will get if it can’t use all the data that it will collect on Federal Government website? It won’t be able to use in any way…well maybe at an aggregate level to compete with the likes of ComScore . So what do I think the reason is? Behavioral Targeting I think the real answer to Google Analytics’ rolling out Opt-out is “ Behavioral Targeting ”. Google Analytics is deployed on thousands of websites and collects a wealth of data. However, so far this data is used by ind...

This week Google Adwords announced that it is rolling out a feature called "Remarketing" . This feature is essentially "Retargeting" which I described in my blog post Retargeting 101 How does it work? You visit a site, look at some products, maybe add some of the products to the shopping cart but then decide not to buy them because you need some more time to think about it. You close your browser and are done with that site. Few minutes later you go back to your computer and browse to another site, say a news site. As the page of that site loads so does an Ad that is from the site that you visited yesterday (where you looked at some products but did not buy). For Google Remarketing to work, the news site will need to be a part of Google content network. So far Google used to show Adsense ads based on the content of the page but now it will start showing ads that match the interest of the person viewing the page (as identified by a cookie and retargeted by a market...

During 2007-2008 I wrote a lot about online privacy on this blog. Most of the online privacy discussion at that time revolved around online targeting based on tracking users online behaviors also knows as behavioral targeting . It amazes my how many privacy advocates and senators are concerned about anonymous online tracking and behaviorally targeted ads based on peoples click behavior when the consumers are voluntarily giving all the private information on social media sites. Last week Google Analytics announced a plug-in that will let users opt-out of Google Analytics . Really...is web analytics tracking detrimental to visitors' privacy? Google Analytics collects click stream data anonymously. It does not know who you are, it identifies you via a cookie and tracks what pages were viewed by that cookie, what buttons were clicked by cookie etc. This data is then used by individual sites using the tool (Google Analytics) to understand the behavior of their visitors and optimize the...

Last week I wrote about 404 errors and how to track them in your web analytics tool . In this post I am going to look at how various sites are dealing with 404 error messages and provide your 7 ways of handling 404 pages on your site. The best way to handle the 404 error messages is to not have any by properly setting redirects in case of a redesign, proper sitemaps etc. But despite your best efforts there will be cases when your visitors will get the 404 errors so you just have to be prepared. This post will show you how other sites are doing it so that you can decide what will work for you. I looked at few of the top converting online retailers and few others random sites to see how they are handling 404 error messages. Here is what I found Schwan.com Schwan.com, the site with the best conversion rate, notifies the visitors that the page does not exist and then provides a link back to the home page. It also keeps the top navigation intact on the 404 page so that the visitors can eas...

I hope you have heard the famous words of John Wanamaker "I know half of my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half." Today the phrase should be something like “Half my Advertising is wasted because I do not advertise responsibly” or “Half of my advertising is wasted; I can stop that but I fail to use the data”. Yes that is correct. We have an abundance of data today to help us save the wastage. There is no shortage of tools that will collect all sorts of data. Yet many marketers fail to act responsibly and use this data to stop advertising waste and also save customers from unwanted ads. Here are some examples that will show you what I mean Newsletter – Nordstrom - In my blog post on email and relevance , I showed an example of an email from Nordstrom that had irrelevant offers. As result of this, not only did Nordstrom waste time, effort and money but also lost a subscriber. Advertising was wasted. Newsletter – Drugstors.com – Same as Nordstrom. Not only d...

People are bombarded with hundreds of email messages each day. However a majority of the emails end up in the trash because of their irrelevance to the recipients. On Oct 30th, 2008 I write a blog post on relevancy and emails . To state my point I showed an example of an email that John Song received from Nordstrom. John, who had never purchased any women products from Nordstrom, was receiving emails promoting women products. During our conversation John said that he was a big fan of Nordstrom and was ok with receiving and ignoring irrelevant emails but he wished that they would send him relevant products/offers though. No matter how big a fan a person is of brand, eventually the patience runs out. Guess what happened recently? John got so tired of the irrelevant emails that he finally hit the small “unsubscribe” link on the email he recently received. Done. Gone. Here is what John wrote on his Facebook status (came via his Twitter update). Companies work very hard to get people t...

Should web analytics tool track visitors as unique individuals or at the aggregate level? John Squire, Chief Strategy Office of Coremetrics says that tracking at Individual level is the way to go and this is how his company is differentiating itself (from Google analytics) . Brian Clifton, former heard of Google Analytics in EMEA, responded by saying that aggregation is the way to go . In my opinion both of them are right. Which route to go really depends on what you want from the web analytics tool? Aggregate Data If you are new to web analytics or you just want to track and analyze the overall health of your website, aggregated data will work for you. If you want to know how your marketing efforts are performing in terms of driving traffic or online conversions than aggregate data will just work fine for you. If you want to know which pages of your site are bleeding and then conduct A/B testing or Multivariate testing to improve them then aggregate data will work for you. Individual ...

At OMMA Global, this week, I attend a panel titled “Behavioral Advertising Partners: Choosing Wisely”. The panel was moderated by Brian Massey, of ClickZ and the panelists were Joe Apprendi, Founder and CEO, Collective Media Richard Frankel, President, Rocket Fuel Inc. Jeff Hirsch, President & CEO, Audience Science (formerly Revenue Science) Nancy Marzouk, VP Media Sales, x+1 Dave Zinman, VP and GM Display Advertising, Yahoo Panelist were asked to come up with one question that the advertiser must ask before making a decision about which networks to use for their Behavioral Targeting campaigns. Here are the 5 questions that they came up with: Where are my ads going to run? How am I going to achieve my goals? What data is going to be used for Targeting? What is fundamentally different about what your company does as compared to other networks? Why should I be spending my time with various networks, what do they do different? It was clear that the onus is on the advertiser to dig in ...

In March of 2007 I wrote that Google should enter behavioral targeting and I even predicted that it will. Guess what? On Wednesday (March 11, 2009) Google officially announced that it will start “Interest Based Advertising” (which is also called “Behavioral Targeting”). Google has tried Behavioral Targeting in past and started talking about ad personalization , but this is the first time it officially announced that it will start Behavioral Targeting. In my post titled Google and Behavioral Targeting I wrote: “I think it is a matter of time when Google start connecting the dots and announce it’s entry into Behavioral Targeting. They might call it something else but at the core it will be leveraging the visitors’ behavior all across the web to better target ad on its network.” At this point I am not clear on where Google will collect this data from. I encourage you to read my blog post to see what sort of data Google can potentially use for Behavioral targeting . Google’s large footp...

The next few months are going to be busy with a few conferences. Below is the list of the conferences where I will be, starting with the most recent. I would love to meet with you if you are going to be at one of these conferences. Do's & Don'ts for Behavioral Segmentation, Targeting & Interactive Marketing – San Francisco, CA March 9th Expanding on their Web Analytics Association webcast, this interactive panel session digs deeper into the proper methodology behind developing a comprehensive online marketing plan. Discussions include: Techniques to build comprehensive online behaviour profiles How to take action and target segments with relevant content Extending analytics to target both online & offline This event begins at 8:30 with breakfast and runs until 12:00 noon. Space is limited, so reserve your seat at this complimentary event today. Register now Market to Max – SDMA Conference, Seattle, March 11th Future of Web Analytics – Measuring in the Web 2.0 World ...