'Net Features : behavioral

Doubling AOV with Behavioral Commerce

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:30:00 GMT

The more you know about your customers, the better positioned you are to sell them products - and sell more in general. Online hat retailer Hats in the Belfry can apparently attest to that.

The internet retailer selected retargeting and behavioral commerce platform Steelhouse, an Ad-Tech Innovation award winner, and saw its average order values increase a whopping 95 percent. Steelhouse enabled the retailer to segment shoppers based on their buying habits and then engage them in a 1-on-1 dialogue (go ahead, call it what it is - live chat) with those customers in real time on the site.

As a test, Hats in the Belfry targeted the “Toe-in-the-Water Shopper,” – one who places relatively low dollar item(s) in their cart and then purchases the item(s). The retailer offered a 15-percent discount on orders of more than $75 to Toe-in-the-Water shoppers, and in doing so, increased their average order values from $53.67 to $104.16.

“With the SteelHouse platform, we can deploy real-time offers to dozens of segments of shoppers in order to maximize our average order value and revenue by shopper type,” says James Sackar, ecommerce general manager of Hats in the Belfry. “We’re able to see the results immediately hit our bottom line.”

Site-Side Behavioral Targeting

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:30:00 GMT

SaaS website testing and personalization provider Amadesa announced the launch of an automated, site-side Behavioral Targeting capability.

The algorithm analyzes hundreds of anonymous user data attributes (time of day, day of week, IP address, referring URL, etc.) in real time to learn which campaign promotion, category image or other content element is most compelling and automatically matches the best content to each visitor to drive engagement. This in-session updating captures visitors' actions and behaviors, incorporating them into personas. The value is that merchants are able to act on these finding in real time.

“Amadesa’s site-side Behavioral Targeting algorithm goes above and beyond how most marketers define personalization by incorporating principles more commonly seen in advanced advertising solutions and applying them on marketers’ sites,” explained Rita Brogley, Amadesa’s CEO. “Although the technology is among the industry’s most sophisticated, the integrated user interface makes Behavioral Targeting easy to implement with little follow-up required of the marketer. This truly automated personalization creates micro-segments to engage consumers more quickly and take them deeper into the site to ultimately improve conversions and engagement.”

Basic Behavioral Targeting (and Segmentation) - BTBuckets

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 11 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Behavioral segmentation usually catches the attention of privacy advocates but in the end, consumers spend and interact more when that functionality is present. As such, some level of behavioral segmentation is almost required these days if you hope not to fall too far behind.

Fortunately, there are some relatively easy ways to get started without breaking the bank - BTBuckets is one. The free web-segmentation tool allows sites to create user "clusters" based on user behavior. These clusters can then be integrated with your advertising server, content management system, web analytics (a tutorial for integrating BTbuckets into Google Analytics here) or any other site tool to ultimately create a richer user experience.

BTBuckets has essentially created an open configuration interface to allow for segment creation based on a combination of any interactions on your site. The service enables marketers to determine how much time users' must have spent before being added to a cluster, define how many times a view must visit content before being added to a bucket, and determine how long users will be kept in each cluster.

Overall, a very powerful service and one to consider. BTBuckets is free (it's in beta) but there is a five million monthly cap for each site. You should be aware that BTBuckets uses first-party cookies to control behavioral segments, but they have created an opt-out program for end users.

Dynamic Pricing Model for Behavioral Targeting

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:14:00 GMT

Online advertising network Turn announced last week the release of a dynamic pricing solution for behaviorally targeted advertising.

Most networks currently price behavioral offerings as a premium above a fixed CPM (cost per thousand impressions) price for standard inventory on the promise of performance. The problem is that this method does not account for recency of behavior or relevance of users to the advertisers message. Turn's solution prices inventory based on value to the advertiser and the actual measureable performance of the campaign.

"Our dynamic pricing model is an alternative to how advertisers are purchasing behavioral inventory today. In this world, offerings aggregate all users in the behavioral segment and every impression is assumed to have equal value to the advertiser. In reality, all users are not equal and pricing should reflect that," comments Dominic Bennett, vice president of engineering at Turn.

Behavioral Targeting with AlmondNet CEO Roy Shkedi

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:31:00 GMT

Website Magazine contributor Dante Monteverde discusses behavioral targeting with AlmondNet CEO Roy Shkedi.

WM: Give us the bare bones – how do you define BT?
AlmondNet defines BT as enabling Internet users to see relevant, privacy-sensitive ads wherever they go. Basically, delivered ads are based on Internet users’ recently demonstrated purchase-intent behavior.

Where did the need for AlmondNet materialize?
We recognized that the Internet advertising market was inefficient. Most advertising inventory is unsold or sold for very low rates, and moreover, most delivered ads are untargeted. We saw a solution. By enabling the delivery of targeted ads to consumers wherever they go, we help all online constituencies--- consumer see relevant, privacy-sensitive ads, data providers receive incremental revenue, publishers sell their ad space for a higher price, advertisers reach their target audience.

What are the top three factors that make AlmondNet different from your competitors?
1) Largest aggregator and distributor of data online;
2) Focused on purchase-intent data that delivers conversions for advertisers;
3) Pro-active approach to privacy

What are “Post-Search” ads and how do they benefit consumers, advertisers and media owners?
Post-search ads are behaviorally-targeted ads delivered to consumers wherever they go based on their recently conducted search or demonstrable purchase-intent behavior. Consumers benefit from relevant, privacy-sensitive ads wherever they go, instead of irrelevant ads. Advertisers reach a target audience that is in purchasing mode, wherever that audience goes, for a lower price than on search engine pages and with minimal clutter and competition from competing advertisers. Media-owners receive a higher price for their inventory, since they are able to deliver targeted ads for a reasonable price instead of delivering lower-priced run of site ads or no sold ads at all.

Behavioral Targeting advertising often has negative connotations; how does AlmondNet allay privacy concerns?
We allay privacy concerns on a few different fronts. First, AlmondNet is a member of three self-regulatory organizations (Network Advertising Initiative, Truste, Internet Advertising Bureau) and exceeds the privacy principles adopted by each of them. We feel it’s important for companies like us to be ingrained within these groups.

We also uphold more than a few privacy polices internally. We do not collect personally-identifiable information. We use non-persistent cookies that expire after 60 days. And, AlmondNet does not permit its media owner partners to use AlmondNet data for more than 30 days OR to link it with personally-identifiable information of any kind.

We also have a privacy officer that audits the privacy policies of all data provider partners and requires insertion of the NAI consumer opt-out and other policy modifications prior to integration. AlmondNet requires all of its partner data providers to insert an NAI opt-out link in the privacy policy of all sites where consumer data is collected.

We’ve always taken a pro-active approach to privacy. For example, AlmondNet was the first company to call for an industry-wide “opt-out within every behaviorally-targeted” banner.

Are there any challenges to deploying your technology correctly?
Integration with AlmondNet is seamless for data providers and media-owners.

How do you emphasize privacy to new partners?
We require all data provider partners to sign a contract verifying the following:
-They will not pass personally-identifiable information to AlmondNet;
-They will amend their privacy policy according to AlmondNet recommendations;
-They will insert an opt-out link in their privacy policy

We also require all data distributors to sign a contract verifying that:
-They will post an appropriate website privacy policy;
-They will not merge AlmondNet data with personally-identifiable information;
-They will not use AlmondNet data for more than 30 days;

What do you see as a next big trend in BT in the next five or ten years?
Behaviorally-targeted and other data-driven ads will become commonplace (i.e. the majority of delivered ads online) as they are the only solution for monetizing content that is difficult to monetize via contextual means.

Are there are any other trends in BT that you feel are important to website owners?
We’d like to emphasize to website owners that the behavior of their users within their site is valuable information that they should be monetizing outside their site via partnerships with companies such as AlmondNet. No website should allow any ad network or other company to drop cookies on its users within its website and use that information elsewhere without compensating the website. Websites spend lots of money to drive traffic to their sites. It is time they started leveraging the behavior of their site visitors when those site visitors are off their sites--- 99% of their time!