Behavioural marketing in simple terms can be described as delivering an experience online based on what you know about the previous behaviour of the visitor.
One of the most common things tracked, just to cite an example is category affinity. A very interesting example from one of my classes here could probably describe it in the best way. Suppose an online music retail store is using this method to determine the music affinity of its customers. It could try to get in certain details about the person like the pin code and email before he begins to browse or/and buy. And then just record his behaviour visiting the website. Such an exercise can help the marketers to know that people of which locality like which type of music. And probably they can present the same taste on the home page when the user logs in next. Of course, this would be a hypothesis that needs to be tested. This can very well be tested in the retail stores as well. Merchandising mangers are now merchandising on home page which was earlier a rare phenomenon. The point here is that “Rule of thumb” in this case might not always be “The Rule of Thumb”. The experience must be relevant to the visitor.
One of the big challenges for video marketers is finding the means to track the browser’s purchasing intent after their initial video experience, and serve them up with targeted content even when they visit other websites.
So, what is “behavioural targeting?”
So, what is “behavioural targeting?”
According to Michael Benedek, VP of the behavioural marketing firm Almondnet, behavioural targeting is the delivery of content or other user experience to a person based on their observed, previous online behaviour. Often this is done by implementing a cookie when a person in on a participating site, which then follows the person’s browsing activity after that initial point of contact.
Behavioural targeting can be used to provide marketers with information on the types of video of interest to consumers. Using this information, they could, in turn, select videos for the site which they’re working on that appeal to consumer interest and select content that would also reflect the video’s subject matter for the purposes of optimizing this site’s content for search engines.
The AlmondNet process - how behavioural advertising is done with video ads
AlmondNet, like most other companies in the behavioural targeting space, deals with “behavioural advertising”
Here is an overview of AlmondNet’s behavioural targeting with search and video:
A visitor arrives to a website that contracted with AlmondNet.
Once that visitor demonstrates some form of valuable commercial intent behaviour (search, etc) on the site, they have a non-persistent cookie placed on their web browser and their behaviour, the date on which the behavior was collected, and the identity of the data-providing site are recorded. (The search query is also placed into one of “40 relevant behavioural categories,” which will be used to match the user with targeted video advertising the next time they visit an AlmondNet partner site.)
The cookie allows AlmondNet and its partner ad networks to identify the user upon the user’s arrival within one of AlmondNet’s partner ad networks’ ad space, thus allowing the ad network to provide the user with a relevant, targeted ad on the video content being watched.
Michael says that AlmondNet’s role is to serve as the intermediary, or “trader,” between data-owners and media owners to “provide consumers with relevant, privacy-sensitive, ‘Post-Search TM ads’ – wherever they go.” Websites that owns commercially-monetizable data contracts with AlmondNet to have its data monetized outside its own website.
With privacy and security issues being a major concern for browsers, Michael says that user search behaviour is recorded by AlmondNet “only on partner search engine sites and other sites owning purchase-intent data that contract with AlmondNet and provide users with a link to the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) site which includes an opt-out option, and not on other sites where the user happens to browse.”
Video ad example – behavioural targeting with search
Here is an example scenario of a user’s video experience without and with behavioural targeting involved.
Say person that searched for “health insurance” on a search engine or other website, views video content on a large site or ad network site a few days later…
Viewing an untargeted ad...
Viewing a targeted ad..
As you can see, a health-related overlay ad plays right on top of the video content. Mike explains the delivery of the targeted video ad is enabled either directly or in cooperation with an AlmondNet distribution partner (ad network, publisher, ad exchange, etc.)
Challenges with behavioural advertising, search and video:
Reach – for it to be effective, the user first has to visit a website that is an AlmondNet partner where they conduct their search; then, they eventually visit a website where the partner ad networks’ video advertising actually appears.
Infancy – Top social networks such as MySpace and Facebook have introduced behavioural targeting systems to help advertisers zero in on certain audiences, but such efforts are still in an early stage
Implementation and Standardization – Technical and marketing challenges such as scalability, video player and ad server standardization, and video content categorization are some of the more pressing challenges.
Pricing - behavioural advertising, especially with video, may well be outside the range of small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) to participate in at the current time.
Marketers working to use video to drive visitor engagement are primarily concerned with the events that occur after the first clip has been viewed, tracking whether visitor click through to the web site, whether visitors watch additional videos, and whether these visitors exhibit different behaviours than the non-video watching population interacting with the site. It is thus, important to pay attention to what happens after the search and click. It can be done in two ways:
Basic, on-site behavioural tracking: utilizing your website video analytics program (Google Analytics as the free version, Overture as a recommended paid version), and measuring event tracking within your video content. This also works very well with funnel activity (where your visitors most commonly start off and end up on your site, all the way up to exiting). When you can see patters and trends with use activity from entry to exit, this will give you a better idea of what video content may be most relevant to their purchasing intent.
Advanced – off-site behavioural tracking: Setting up your site to implement cookies, which will allow you to follow what the visitor does after they leave your site. Because this can be very complex, an easier way of controlling it is to just go with search engine referrals, and categorize those searches however you wish. So when the visitor returns, you can now serve up the returning visitor to a special landing page with video content (that matches any of your pre-set video categories)
As you can tell, behavioral targeting vendor solutions may be out of reach for most businesses today, but online video marketers and especially video SEO’s can learn a lot from how to better optimize websites and video content with do-it-yourself strategies, just by matching search activity with engagement analytics.
I am neither supporting nor criticizing behaviour targeting. A lot of people consider this method as an opportunity to grow revenues and minimize advertising costs. This might be so, but I just fear that it might also turn out to be a very dangerous trend for the advertising industry. There are issues of privacy and law and customer honesty to deal with which eventually increases the risks. Well, how is it going to help or harm the marketers and the businesses out there..only time will tell!!
Source:
0 comments:
Post a Comment