'Net Features : segmentation

Six Social Media Personas Driven by Trust and Control

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 19:15:00 GMT

How much do you know, I mean really know, about your brand’s social media fans, friends and followers? And how would your social media marketing strategy change if you had access to that information?

Loyalty management vendor Aimia has released an interesting segmentation model that identifies six distinct social media personas and maps based upon the behavioral drivers of trust and control. Aimia’s Staring at the Sun: Identifying, Understanding and Influencing Social Media Users report argues that no single social media channel can deliver a complete picture of customer behavior.

"Today's approach to social media measurement – racing to rack up the most 'likes,' retweets, followers and recommendations – is the wrong approach," says Doug Rozen, lead author of the report and senior vice president of communications, design & emerging technologies at Aimia. "Marketers must define success not by social media activity, but rather by customer value and engagement."

Aimia’s research reveals that the more trust consumers place in social media networks, the more likely they are to participate. Likewise, the more control consumers perceive of their social activity, the more likely they are to engage with a variety of networks.

"Control equals exposure, and trust equals participation," says Rozen. "The more control a consumer perceives over their social media activity, the more likely they are to engage with a wider variety of social media networks. The more trust a consumer places in social media networks and their connections, the more likely they are to actively participate."

The report maps social media usage and outlines differences between types of social media participation via six distinct personas:

- No Shows (41 %) – lease involved in social media, engage infrequently

- Newcomers (15 %) – passive involvement; engage to enhance offline relationships

- Onlookers (16 %) – involvement is observational, sharing almost no information

- Cliquers (6 %) – active users of one network, influential amongst a small group

- Mix-n-Minglers (19 %) – regularly sharing and interact within a diverse group

- Sparks (3 %) – most active and engaged, serve as enthusiastic brand ambassadors

Aimia mapped these personas to social brand-related activities (writing reviews, purchasing product, viewing videos, interacting on forums and blogs, check-ins) and found that the more passive “Onlookers” are just as interested in flash sales and daily deals as the two most active personas – Mix-n-Minglers and Sparks. Applying social media personas and segmentation is useful in that brands can target users based on their behavior.

Cross Visit Analytics in Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:48:00 GMT

Adobe has added a cross-visit analytics feature into its Discover product, an analytics and segmentation solution within the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite.

The feature will enable marketers to see a visitors path within a Web property and provide a more holistic view of a visitors entire experience beyond single sessions. The offering can also reveal why purchases and conversion do not occur. Armed with insights about multiple visits within their properties, marketers will get a better picture of why customers are leaving without converting - and ultimately allocate marketing spend to activities that can result in greater returns.

“Consumers don’t interact with their favorite sites in discrete, unconnected visits,” said Matt Langie, director of product marketing, Digital Marketing Business, Adobe. “They do a search and hit your home page, read reviews, leave, get an email offer, price compare, come back and finally convert. The diversity and complexity of any one visitor’s experience over time yields very different insights than looking at each visit as a distinct, separate experience. Adobe Discover provides analytics that mirror the actual visitor experience.”

Availability of the cross-visit analytics feature within Adobe Discover is expected in April 2012.

Personalization, Segmentation and ROI

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:20:00 GMT

It's not difficult to make a case for testing segmentation and personalization. You'd have to have be pretty thick-headed not to see the benefits. Most merchants however don't engage in the opportunity that is present. Sometime you need a nudge in the right direction and the best way to do that is often to show results. While there are many personalization solution providers on the market, let's look at one particular vendor in Amadesa and the positive results that pet specialty retailer Petco had using their segmentation and A/B testing software.

Petco (which offers consumers more than 11,000 different products and attracts more than a million unique visitors each month) is using Amadesa’s Segmentation and A/B Testing solution to boost overall site revenue, revenue per visit and opt-in email subscriptions. The results were impressive; email subscriptions improved by more than 400 percent and Petco achieved over 18 times return on investment by using Amadesa's segmentation and A/B testing software. PETCO also uses Amadesa’s software to improve the performance of its search engine marketing campaigns by targeting underperforming keywords. Segmenting visitors according to referring keyword, referring engine and other online factors enables PETCO to run targeted A/B tests within customer segments to determine which offers, copy and other content elements best increase customer engagement.

“Our efforts with Amadesa have produced great results. Revenue per visit and email opt-ins, two of our key performance indicators, have both increased significantly since we began this partnership,” said Carol Ott, Director of Finance Reporting & Web Analytics for PETCO. “We’ve worked with Amadesa for almost a year now, and they’ve been extremely responsive. They are committed to our success and seek out and apply our feedback regularly.”

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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.

Segmentations Features at Google Analytics

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:14:00 GMT

Google released seven new features for its analytics product yesterday, the most noteworthy of which perhaps the advanced segmentation.

The advanced Segmentation feature allows users to isolate and identify subsets of traffic. Select from predefined custom segments such as "Paid Traffic" and "Visits with Conversions" or create entirely new custom segments. Users can then apply one or more of those segements to current or historical data, and compare segment performance side by side.

Google's analytics evangilist Avinash Kaushik (who contributed to Website Magazine's August edition with the article Understanding Consumer Behavior with Web Analytics), has just posted a blog on how to use Advanced Segmentation which is a must-read to quickly learn how to take advantage of this powerful feature.

Other features released yesterday include custom reports and motion charts, but a whole slate of future improvements (currently in beta) have been outlined including a data export API and integrated reporting with AdSense.