How to Develop a Consistent Targeting Strategy
Five tips for bridging the divide between offsite and onsite targeting efforts.
Five tips for bridging the divide between offsite and onsite targeting efforts.
Targeting, a hot-topic marketing practice, deserves digital marketers’ attention. Targeting can help marketers deliver the right content or message to the right person, at the right time and in the right space. But targeting can be an ambiguous concept. Often it means different things to different people.
Most digital marketers divide their efforts between offsite and onsite targeting. Offsite targeting comprises advertising and demand-generation activities like search, display, and e-mail. They drive performance by sending traffic to your online real estate. Successful marketers recognize that traffic by itself won’t guarantee success, so they apply site-side strategies to maximize performance once a visitor lands on the site.
Today’s holy grail for targeting requires the integration of off- and onsite targeting efforts. This happens too rarely, however. Ask yourself these questions: How often does your paid-search team seek data and insights from the person who manages Web site analytics? How often do your site-optimization efforts employ data and insights from the teams that manage search and display media?
Below are the most typical and effective forms of off- and onsite targeting, as well as tips for how businesses can successfully bridge the divide so targeting represents one consistent marketing strategy, rather than separate parts of a disjointed and sometimes ineffective effort.
Offsite Targeting
Most ads are served contextually, meaning that if you visit auto site Edmunds.com, you’ll probably see a lot of ads related to cars. But offsite targeting is more precise. Here you rely on a huge network, or networks, to provide different ways to serve traffic based on user behaviors or profiling. The targeting can happen by any number of factors. For example:
While results vary greatly depending on product, business, season, and so forth, the industry has pretty much proven that targeted ads consistently outperform their generic and even contextual counterparts.
A popular form of offsite behavioral targeting is search re-targeting. Here, an ad-serving platform can identify a person who has performed specific searches in the past. A corresponding display or text ad can then be served to that person across select network sites they visit. So if you’ve searched for “new cars” or “hybrid cars” on Google, don’t be surprised to see display ads for the Ford Fusion Hybrid or Toyota Prius when you start browsing other sites later in the day. (You might want to think twice about what you’re searching for, because if your spouse reads this column and sees a bunch of unsavory display ads on your home computer…well, you get the picture.)
Onsite Targeting
Onsite targeting relies on a more focused array of characteristics to align a Web site to what a visitor should experience. In addition to offsite parameters (geography, interest group, etc.), as well as other general parameters, such as referring source, you can use any authenticated data (i.e., information kept behind a login) to provide a personalized site engagement for each visitor. As with offsite targeting, there’s no industry average for how a targeted Web site improves business. But anecdotally it isn’t hard to see how a customer will more likely return if the Web experience closely aligns to what she’s clicked on, viewed, or purchased before. At my agency, our site-side targeting test programs are among the most effective ROI (define) proven services we provide for clients.
Amazon and eBay are industry leaders of onsite targeting. Each individual eBay or Amazon user could experience a completely unique site, depending on their past behavior and profile. If you’ve been looking at auctions for Xbox consoles, then the next time you visit eBay, you’ll probably experience a site that features Xbox games, Xbox accessories, and related products. Whether you sell or buy, how much you pay, what types of products you buy, and what time of day you tend to buy certain products are factors that drive onsite targeting.
Fortunately you don’t need to be an eBay or an Amazon to take advantage of site-side targeting. Tools like Omniture’s Test & Target and Optimost allow companies to deliver targeted site experiences.
Bridging the Divide
Bridging the divide between off- and onsite targeting efforts will be unique for every business, but here are some recommendations:
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