Targeting Multi-Modally

by Phil Leggiere, Wednesday, September 26, 2007

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF BEHAVIORAL TARGETING are simple: getting the right message to the right person at the right place at the right time. Applying those simple fundamentals to real-world media behavior, however, is unfortunately not so simple. In fact it's getting more complex all the time. As consumers become ever more nimble at moving across myriad media channels to get the information and entertainment they want, marketers remain frustratingly flat-footed in traversing the new digital arena. Adapting targeting to the complexities of digital behavior, Bob Walczak, CEO of mobile ad network MoPhap explains below, requires a truly multi-modal data platform.

Behavioral Insider: What's unique in your approach to how behavioral data can work in what you call a multi-modal environment?

Walczak: The challenge with behavioral targeting lies in reaching the same customer across different media. With MoPhap's mobile server-side cookie, we're able to target by creating a comprehensive profile based upon a user's browsing history over time. The technology derives contextual meaning from each page that the user visits. This combines to create a psychographic user profile. We're also able to identify the specific mobile device. We can then ensure that ads served to consumers are optimal in terms of both format and content. Until now, there's been no way to bridge mobile and online data because the mechanisms for gathering, organizing, and interpreting data were so different. Online tracking has been -- and largely remains -- cookie-based, and mobile has lacked a unified tracking platform for contextual or behavioral data. With mobile, each individual publisher or network has used its own proprietary software and server set-up. None have been compatible with or comparable to the online world.

BI: How are you applying the platform concretely?

Walczak: Our goal is to forge partnerships with online ad networks such as MeMedia. We're enabling them and their advertisers to sell into mobile for the first time. From the very beginning, we've attempted to build out a platform that brings online functionality to a mobile environment. With that in mind, we're been the first to configure third-party ad serving via various partnerships, including ContextWeb. The benefit is that we've been laying the groundwork for a seamless movement back and forth between online and mobile -- which is the same direction where consumers are now moving.

BI: Can you give some examples of how that can work?

Walczak: Here's a simple example of bringing digital mediums together: A consumer clicks on a mobile Web banner, opts in for an SMS auto response, and later receives a text message that includes a coupon code that must be redeemed online. With the mobile cookie, we're now able to tie the subscribers together online and in mobile.

BI: What are the attractions of multi-modal targeting of behavior to an agency?

Walczak: There are benefits to doing this. First, anyone trying to plan and buy mobile campaigns has been limited by lack of reach and frequency. By seamlessly aggregating data across mediums, there's a huge potential for increase in both. Also, for brands interested in targeting a younger demographic of heavy mobile users, they now have a wider scope of options.

Another benefit is that mobile advertisers can plug into the auditing, tracking, and reporting solutions they've used online to track consumer behavior. Agencies can use their interactive systems such as Atlas Media Console and Dart to manage online and mobile campaigns. They can also integrate data from online and mobile campaigns into their back-end systems, which allows media buyers to view results and make mobile buying decisions in the same way they'd been doing so for online buys.

Custom Targeting With Tribal Fusion Service

Written on
August 29th 2007


Tribal Fusion, an ad network under Exponential Interactive has announced the launch of Dynamic Ads. Dynamic Ads gives advertisers the ability to create customized messages using one creative to target users based on behavior, location, demographic and other profiling components.

The company has reported an increase of up to 80% in conversion rates for some campaigns due to this refined model. The goal of Dynamic Ads is to streamline the customization process in a sort of one-stop-shop structure for marketers looking to create the most relevant ads for their consumers. Using Dynamic Ads, marketers are able to customize landing page links depending on the offer.

Exponential’s vice president of strategic marketing, Alistair Goodman remarked on the unique quality of the program Tribal Fusion is providing, “I’m not aware of others that are providing such robust targeting capabilities with this level of message customization. Dynamic Ads enables advertisers to instantly create communication with much greater relevancy and efficiency.”

Dynamic Ads has only been offered to a few partners, but with the positive results Tribal Fusion is planning on extending the service to more of its clients.
Tags: ad serving, dynamic ads, exponential interactive and Tribal Fusion

Integrated SEM,SEO,Adserving + data to increase targeting and optimization across our ecosystem

This is an interesting trend and direction in the market. Moving towards integrated data that feeds intelligence back and forth from SEO,SEM etc to ad campaigns running on and offline. As a future part of our ecosystem it would be very beneficial to have our different systems and solutions passing data back and forth to enhance the clients campaigns and media performance from advario to SEM, SEO to Advaliant. Since they are all sitting on the same platform this can be done and would be EXTREMELY powerful and unique. The ultimate targeting and optimization!!! Food and product for thought and future development as an ecosystem module/function.

Range Online Launches 'Next-Gen' Search Reporting/Modeling Tool

by Tameka Kee, Tuesday, Aug 21, 2007 6:00 AM ET

RANGE ONLINE MEDIA, A FORT Worth, TX-based search and digital marketing company, has launched the second generation of its Strategic Results System (SRS)--a reporting and measurement platform that merges data from paid and natural search efforts, feeds and other emerging media, as well as third-party analytics and ad servers like Bluestreak. Clients like Cole Haan, Toshiba and The Container Store can use the SRS tool to evaluate their digital marketing campaigns, with analysis ranging from keyword-specific paid and organic search details to cross-vertical reports on campaign performance trends and search activity seasonality. The ability to incorporate data from third parties like Google and Eyeblaster was integral to Range's upgrade of SRS. According to Misty Locke, Range's co-founder and president, "SRS' ability to merge data from any source that a client is working with means that we can better help them gauge the health of their business as a whole. They get a clearer view with fewer reports to look at." The scalability also allows Range to pair online campaign data with off-line strategy info. "From email campaigns, to TV spots, clients can plug in data from wherever they're running media and see how all the channels are working together," said Locke. "The data also lends itself to creative testing." While Range clients have direct access to the SRS data warehouse, the software is seen as a complement--not a replacement--for human insight. "With massive amounts of data, you need automation for speed and efficiency, but not without human insight to make business decisions," said Locke. "Our clients want more than a black box solution, because there's no technology that can effectively analyze the customer intent that underlies SEM, SEO, and overall market trends." Tameka Kee can be reached at tameka@mediapost.com

Merchandising As Targeting, Targeting As Merchandising

Merchandising As Targeting, Targeting As Merchandising by Phil Leggiere, Wednesday, June 6, 2007 THE METAPHOR of the auction place has captivated the online world of late. Thus far, however, applications of the model have been divided into two separate realms, e-commerce transactions (a la affiliate marketing) and conventional banner or text ad placement. The next iteration of the model, Pradeep Javangula, CTO of Tumri, predicts below, will involve a new synthesis of the ad network and e-commerce: a merchandising network, with product offer delivery optimized by behavioral and other forms of targeting. Behavioral Insider: Tumri doesn’t seem to fit into any conventional category of ad network. Could you describe what you do? Pradeep Javangula: We call what we do automatic personalization. Our background is in artificial intelligence and the semantic Wb and our focus is on classifying large volumes and content, specifically content related to product offers and services. So we see Tumri as a targeted merchandising network for delivering product offers, which may include ads but are more than just conventional banner or text ads. We think in terms of offers rather than ads. Our clients include many of the most successful online merchants, over 1500 merchants and 500 brands. We match up their offers to the right publishers and consumers. BI: How do you make your merchant catalogs more targetable? Javangula: Shopping catalogs have enormous amounts of very rich information. In many ways, the Web -- or very large parts of it -- can be looked at as one big catalog. Take any large e-tailer. The sheer quantity of information they have online is enormous. The opportunities for organizing and, by extension, targeting product offers based on that data are similarly enormous, but overwhelming for most marketers. Latent in all that data, though, are all sorts of demographic and psychographic attributes. Across all product categories for every brand, you can associate demographic and psychographic markers or tags. Take a Polo shirt, [for example], and its higher-end demographic and more trend-oriented buyer, [while] Lee Jeans are for the more price-conscious and practical-minded clothes shopper. What we do is then classify every piece of product information and give it a demographic and psychographic tag. BI: Where does the consumer come in? Javangula: Then the next step is to find the most relevant match between every user who visits a publisher Web site and the product content they’re most likely to be interested in based on information about who they are. When users visit a Web page, there’s an IP address associated with them which tells you the location they came from -- which in turn gives you a good idea of their demographics as culled from census data. We look at the time of day they visit the site and can infer what they’re interested in, based on profiles of items typically shopped for at that time of day and the demographic profile of people who populate the site that time of day. Very important, you can see the URL the user is coming from. We categorize every Web publication by content analysis in much the same way we extract demographic and psychographic attributes related to product catalogs. BI: Could you discuss the behavioral component? Javgula: Finally, if they’ve clicked through to the Web site using a keyword search, you then move from demographic information to purchase intent. So from the moment a user enters the site we have begun to frame a fairly detailed profile of who they are and what their interests are -- a profile that will be continually refined based on other publications they go to. From there, we begin to evolve a more behaviorally based profile of them based on product browsing and sales history. BI: How do you do that? Javangula: Within the publisher site itself we look at individual pages as proxies of a user’s intent. Say one million users have been to that page. Each one that comes brings a profile that validates, conflicts with or in some way adds to the brand, demographic, psychographic or behavioral attributes we associate with that page. So page by page the system is continually learning from experience. Based on everything we know, we do a real-time algorithmic decision based on our best hypotheses about the most relevant product offer we can introduce. BI: What kind of options do publishers have in selecting which offers will run on their sites? Javangula: Basically as much or as little as they want. We have them create a very easy-to-use template or wizard describing the kind of offers they want to run, which can be customized by categories, merchants, price range, keywords and other criteria based on their own user profile. Many give us a general set of criteria and then use our technology to drill more deeply. Others want more control. Either approach can be accommodated. BI: What kind of response is there from clients? Javangula: Once they see major improvements in click-through and conversions, most of them get the model very quickly. We think the boundaries between the advertisement, as it’s traditionally been known, and overall content, are becoming more and more blurred. Clients say to us ‘Wow. This is an application, not an advertisement’ -- and that, in many ways, is the best way to look at it.

Targeting online ads - the early morning fog has yet to

Using technology to target online ads is not a new idea, but that doesn’t make it a bad one. An interview in e-consultancy’s daily briefing yesterday with Paul Cook of PositiveFeedback got me thinking about this topic and it seems to me that this market might be about to have it’s time.
PositiveFeedback is a firm that provides targeting tools for online retailers and their ad agencies.
I took two things away from the interview:
The realisation that many sites haven’t been ready for ad targeting until now - to get value out of targeting ads you need to be measuring ad performance and have a well designed site. Many companies are only getting to that point now, and in this context it is important to remember that a lot of targeting can be done manually - technology is only required to squeeze out the last bit of extra yield - so ad optimising technology hasn’t historically made it to the top of people’s priority lists.
There is a lack of clarity on the uplift in converstion that targeting will bring. On the one hand in the interview Paul Cook says 10% is a reasonable target for most websites, and on the other we have Glen Drury of Yahoo UK saying in the Sunday Times that they get 56%.
This makes it sound like an early market to me. Only starting to get to the top of the priority list for customers and disagreement on the benefits available. If it is an early market the obvious next question is how big it will be. My gut tells me there is a lot to go after here - particularly as the amount of low CPM inventory keeps rising as social networks grow in popularity.
So far companies in this market have generally had a difficult time. Advertising.com (in which we invested when I was at Reuters) has been an exception, and they achieved success by using their optimisation technology to arbitrage play, buying on CPM and selling on CPA.
There are signs that things might be chaning though - Revenue Science looks like it is making good headway, Wunderloop is a very interesting company in this space with some interesting backers, as is Tacoda, and finally Ominture bought UK behavioural targeting business TouchClarity earlier this year.

Joost's Volpi Touts 'Targetability'

by Gavin O'Malley, Wednesday, Jun 6, 2007 6:00 AM ET
WEB TV STARTUP JOOST HANDED the reins to Michelangelo Volpi on Tuesday, naming the seasoned Cisco executive as its new CEO effective immediately. Joost's founding CEO Fredrik de Wahl will retain his role as the company's chief strategy officer.
Volpi, who sees his engineering background meshing well with Joost's tech culture, explained the power of Joost in one word: "targetability."
"Our biggest asset is targetability, and our belief is that TV advertisers want a high degree of targetability," he said. "From an advertiser perspective, we know exactly who's watching what content."
Joost can tailor its ads to individual users based on information they provide--including geography, tastes, and demographic information--along with behavioral patterns.
At Cisco for 13 years, Volpi most recently managed Cisco's $11 billion routing and service provider technology group, including Scientific Atlanta, as senior vice president and general manager. Previously, he headed Cisco's M&A activity, acquiring some 70 companies during his tenure.
"Mike's track record speaks for itself," said Janus Friis, executive co-chairman and co-founder of Joost. "We've known him for many years, as he was a Skype board member."
With regard to Joost's ad model, Volpi assured that pre-rolls will be rare, and will last no longer than five seconds when they do run.
"We want to hold [off] on the ad until the user is highly engaged," explained Volpi.
Joost, founded by the same entrepreneurs--Niklas Zennstrom and Friis--who brought the world Skype and Kazaa, last month announced a lineup of 32 major brand advertisers aided by a year-long partnership with Interpublic Group's Emerging Media Lab. The advertisers include Microsoft, Intel, Motorola and Sony Electronics. Separate deals have been made with Hewlett-Packard, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Nike.
Even before its beta inception in May, Joost explored original ad formats, attempting to improve on the glaring faults of pop-ups, banner ads and pre-rolls.
One new format is an "ad bug," or a brand logo that briefly floats in the corner of a user's screen after encountering a streaming video ad. If users decide to click on the tiny image--designed not to be too intrusive--a new browser window opens with the brand's site.
Unlike video-sharing sites like YouTube, which are dominated by short clips, Joost's mission is to popularize long-form, high-quality, ad-supported content.
The startup has clearly convinced major media companies that it will deliver on these promises. Last month, Joost received $45 million in investment from five prominent media and venture capital companies, including CBS, Viacom, and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.
The company made headlines earlier in the year when it signed Viacom as a content partner, shortly after the media titan filed suit against Google for alleged copyright infringement by YouTube.
Since then, Joost has signed a number of additional content partners, including Warner Music, National Geographic, Turner Broadcasting, The Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and CNN--along with programming from Hasbro, the NHL, Sports Illustrated and Sony Pictures Television.

Online Ad Targeting Gets More Sophisticated

Ads get more targeted
Advertisers and publishers have found new and better ways to target online ads as they become more ubiquitous, reports The Wall Street Journal.
One of the most popular formats is the "rich media" catch-all, which covers a wide range of animated, video and other interactive ads. Another is video. Pre-roll length and effective placement strategies are regularly debated by ad placement specialists.
Publishers are also working on increasing inventory by breaking stories up onto multiple pages and placing some on the front pages of sites. Visitors must click through to get to the story. They are also learning how to interpret data that users voluntarily provide, such as zip codes, to better target ad delivery.
Still, publishers don't want to outdo themselves out of fear of discouraging viewers. Some sites like CNN make sure not to put too many ads on one page so as not to diminish the user experience.

A Picture of AdTopics

This is an image and post i found that describes how the Advario contextual targeting engine reads the density of the page and then targets the red areas for the most relevance.

Anjo Anjewierden posts the image to the left which described the topics found in his blog. The topics are mined automatically and the image essentially represents a graph of the topics where proximity describes relatedness between topics. The colours indicate how strongly related neighbouring terms. Thus, one could interpret this map as a presentation of the topical coherence in the blog. As red indicates strong relatedness, the fewer and larger the red areas are, the more focused the content of the blog.
To really understand the potential value of this type of visualization, it would be great to see a grid of, say, 100 blogs so that one could see if there were any clear patterns. One might see, for example, highly focused blogs as a single, large red blob with a fringe of green. Other blogs which are less topically focused might look like the example above.
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September 16, 2006 in blogosphere, text mining Permalink Comments (0) TrackBack (0)

New book on Behavioral Targeting

New book on Behavioral Targeting

Rob Graham’s new book on Behavioral Targeting and online advertising has been distributed to OMMA, iMediaSummit and AdTech audiences as part of its introduction, and now you can own a copy as well..

Fishing From A Barrel takes an energetic and foundational look at how behavioral targeting is changing the face of advertising as we know it and introduces readers to the fundamentals of behavioral targeting technologies and how advertisers and publishers can use BT to achieve greater campaign and ROI results for their online advertising.

While still in its infancy, Behavioral Targeting is filling in many of the holes that have been part of the direct marketing landscape for over 100 years. Fishing From A Barrel brings readers on a journey that introduces them to concepts such as:

• The future promise of Behavioral Targeting
• Why Mass Marketing isn’t the best way to reach an audience
• How to target and market to ‘individuals’
• How to plan for and create highly targeting ad campaigns
• How publishers are using BT to turn a huge profit
• What you need to know about ‘Customerization’
• How new targeting data goes well beyond demography
• Why contextual targeting often falls short
• Understanding and using ad networks
• Using BT with traditional media channels
• How to collect and use relevant web analytics
• Understanding new definitions of Reach, Acquisition and Conversion
• How to create targeted audience segments
• The importance of privacy to consumers
• What makes consumers consume?
• Meeting consumer needs and expectations with every campaign
• The Foundational Communications Model
• Communicating Interactively
• Who’s who in Behavioral Targeting
• BUY THE BOOK HERE
  

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 4 of 4)

BEHAVIORAL MARKETING

Published: April 20, 2007

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 4 of 4)

By Michael Estrin

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The challenges facing BT

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To paraphrase Graham, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to BT, namely a lack of standardization across solutions. According to Graham, this is no small obstacle, as he writes, "It could prevent BT from gaining the foothold it really needs to complete its paradigm shift."

As Graham sees it, the landscape of BT solutions is a mixed bag of practices because providers employ different approaches to reach consumers. While Graham concedes that the spirit of experimentation in that area will likely pay dividends in terms of innovation, it is something of a drawback for advertisers because running a campaign with a single vendor won't put the message in front of all potential buyers.

For Graham, there is no easy fix for the standardization problem. Although he points out that media exchange solutions and the establishment of standards by a governing body such as the IAB should go a long way toward allowing BT to reach its full potential.

A primer on privacy
At some point in a conversation about BT, someone will likely use the S-word, according to Graham: spying. "There's no way to sugar coat this," Graham writes. "In order to learn more about individual consumers, marketers have to resort to 'spying.'"

While Graham details the some of the legal and business concerns those employing BT should have when it comes to issues of privacy, he makes the point that advertisers and publishers who use BT need to demonstrate to consumers that the practice benefits all parties involved.

"Benefit is the key word here," Graham writes. "As consumers, we demand to know 'what's in it for me' before taking any action. Relevancy is king. If I'm going to give you something, I expect to get something in return."

Beyond BT, the human element
While BT may look like a numbers-heavy discipline, the truth of the matter is that it's really more of a human art. After all, as Graham explains, "it's difficult to understand the parameters of BT without first understanding the realm of human behavior." For that reason alone, Graham delivers some basics on studies in human behavior as they relate to ad campaigns.

According to Graham, the relevance of an ad, whether it's served up via BT or otherwise, comes down to how the ad plays to our core emotions. Whether the ad meshes with our self-described identity, or whether it conflicts with how we see ourselves, will also determine whether a given message can break through the noise of everyday life.

Resources
While "Fishing From a Barrel" is meant to serve as a roadmap for a BT campaign, as well as a strong argument for BT in general, Graham rightly assumes that his readers may not be quite as far along in adopting BT as he would hope. For that reason, Graham concludes his book with a useful "Resource Pack," which contains contact information for various firms offering BT solutions, and better still for the novice reader, brief, easily digested descriptions of what those companies do.

"Fishing From a Barrel" is available from LearningCraft.

Michael Estrin is the associate editor at iMedia Connection. Read full bio.

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 3 of 4)

BEHAVIORAL MARKETING

Published: April 20, 2007

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 3 of 4)

By Michael Estrin

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Five ways to use BT

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As Graham is quick to observe, BT isn't a what, but a how. In "Fishing From a Barrel," he isolates five ways of approaching BT, making clear that a specific marketing goal needs to be set so that the marketer can gauge the campaign's effectiveness.

"By first identifying the specific actions consumers need to take, marketers can create ways to capture and measure data to determine if those goals are being met," Graham writes.

1) Publisher solutions
According to Graham, more than 90 percent of advertisers using BT use some type of publisher-based BT solution. Publisher solutions use identifying characteristics of site visitors, applying those understandings to current visitors in order to serve them relevant ads.

"The main advantage for sites that use behavioral tracking capabilities is that it allows them to be defined within ad networks as a specific audience destination," Graham writes.

2) Ad Network Solutions
Ad networks are a collection of sites representing an expanded range of places where advertisers can run ads. But unlike a single publisher, ad networks offer an added wrinkle to BT, according to Graham.

"Unlike a single site, ad networks can collect consumer data on hundreds of sites and, in some cases, track individual consumers as they travel between sites on the same network," Graham writes.

3) Adware Solutions
Adware solutions are an opt-in way for advertisers to reach consumers directly, usually by giving the consumer some free software or online tools in exchange for their participation. But as Graham points out, advertisers using adware solutions have felt the heat recently from lawsuits seeking to conflate adware with spyware. While a good tool, Graham says he believes only time will tell if it is to be a viable option for BT.

4) Ad Optimization
Ad optimization is considered an offshoot of ad serving. Ad optimization companies typically use intelligent ad serving technologies to interface with a publisher and an ad serving engine.

"The greatest advantage of this process is that targeted consumers can be reached with tier one targeted ads, while visiting pages normally cater to second and third tier inventory," Graham writes.

5) Rich Media Advertising Solutions
To be fair, Graham says he is a "huge fan of rich media solutions," having designed more than 500 rich media ad units in his career.

"To me, the greatest benefit that rich media ads offer advertisers is the ability to help drive the consumer's behavior toward a specific marketing goal," Graham writes.

Campaigns typically involve gathering information such as product preferences, email addresses or ZIP codes. The data is then collected within the ad unit and fed into a back-end database.

The difficulty, according to Graham, is synchronizing the data gathered from an interactive ad with the appropriate web analytics data.

"By tying all the collected campaign data together, it is my expectation that rich media and behavioral targeting will become a juggernaut in the land of online advertising," Graham writes.

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 2 of 4)

BEHAVIORAL MARKETING

Published: April 20, 2007

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Data matters, a lot

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As Graham says, "It all starts with data." Publishers can collect two kinds of data to learn more about their customers. Declared data represents information consumers willingly disclose about themselves, while observed data is information compiled and collected based on how consumers use websites. Once the data is gathered, the challenge, according to Graham, is to make sense of it.

For Graham, the twin-tools of cookies and analytics solutions capable of observing time spent online, and repeat visits and which pages generate the most traffic, are more than just ways to track consumers. As Graham sees it, the online ad experience is a dialogue between consumer and publisher, wherein the publisher (if he is listening) can adjust his business on the fly to meet the needs of a savvy user.

Though Graham points out the use of several BT models, the basic process is quite simple. Publishers create page tags for targeted webpages that are triggered upon a visitor's arrival. The data is then collected and analyzed. Visitors are next grouped according to similar patterns observed while on the site or within the ad network. The groups are then refined into groups of clearly defined audiences. Publishers can then sell advertisers access to highly-targeted audience groups.

While the process may sound basic, for Graham it is revolutionary.

"For the first time in the history of marketing, the ability to reach individuals based on their needs, interests, desires and sudden urges is within reach of advertisers," he writes.

Next: Five ways to use BT

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs

By Michael Estrin

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"Fishing From a Barrel" author Rob Graham explains how to put the right ads in front of the right people.

In "Fishing From a Barrel" author and professor Rob Graham has one message for his readers: Know your customers.

The book, then, to paraphrase Graham, is an attempt to draw a roadmap that aids online advertisers and publishers in understanding the process of planning behaviorally targeted (BT) ad initiatives.

The target
"To be effective in the new world, advertisers have to stop targeting 'us' and start targeting 'me,'" Graham writes. The beauty of BT, Graham argues, is that it allows publishers and advertisers to learn more about their customers not as group, but as individuals.

Rather, than sifting through mountains of data meant to encapsulate the buying patterns of groups of people, Graham sees BT as a way to look into the minds of a single, potential customer.

"By recognizing and tracking the surfing behaviors of individual site visitors, publishers are able to plot patterns of behavior that identify specific areas of interest, current needs and buying intention," Graham writes.

While it is the publishers who must set up their websites to gather information, much the same way a retail store would instruct a clerk to observe a customer's in-store behavior, it is both advertisers and publishers who gain from BT, according to Graham.

In a hypothetical example featuring "Jerry," a busy consumer in the market for mountain biking vacations, Graham explains how tracking each visit made by the consumer to a relevant website, and subsequently serving ads targeted to where Jerry is in the buying cycle, yields positive results for publishers, advertisers and consumers.

By knowing precisely where Jerry was in the buying cycle, the publisher can sell ads at a premium because they cater to the right buyer. And by putting ads in front of a likely buyer, the advertiser wins because relevant ads are better able to convert. As an added benefit, Graham points out that Jerry will benefit because relevant ads help him save time finding what he wants, thus building a stronger relationship between advertiser and consumer.

Next: Data matters, a lot

How HP Manages Global Search Campaigns

Daina Middleton's Imaging and Printing Group (IPG) is only one part of the overall picture at HP.com, but she still has countless consumer segments to think about and just as many or more SMB verticals. While her job of organizing global search is naturally complicated, those concerns were truly scratching the surface when she took over the division's search strategy 16 months ago.

"There are roughly 750,000 pages on HP.com that relate to products in IPG," she says. "I'd say around 95%-99% of the product pages were built a long time ago -- without search in mind. So, we cannot rely on organic results."

In other words, paid search is even more integral to extending the brand online than for firms with decent-to-good SEO. Add in the fact that the division she inherited had at least 16 staffers based around the country (as well as a few worldwide) who were budgeted for online campaigns, but who never spoke with one another. Plus, their own people were unknowingly competing against one another for the same search terms. Other problems:

- Lack of top five placements
- Campaigns weren't tied to overall business objectives
- Corporate couldn't monitor their activity
- Not integrated with print, TV/radio, Web or email
Here are five strategies they implemented to overcome the obstacles:

> Strategy #1. Distinguish global buys

Once Middleton let her team know that their days of doing solo search campaigns without corporate synch-up were over, she began organizing keyword buys into three tiers: global, regional and country.

After looking at Web analytics for online stores in each of their 11 countries, they decided that general terms, such as "color printer," were to be purchased across all three levels in English, due to the widespread use of the language. They are high-cost, widely searched buys that higher-ups consider must-have because of branding and conversion reasons. Higher ROI purchases such as "HP photo printer" are also often purchased across the three tiers.

> Strategy #2. Take regional aspects into consideration

Not surprisingly, search buys get more specific at the regional level. For instance, "digital camera" performs well in the US and Canada, while "digicam" or "snappy" are the regional terms HP uses in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe.

"You have to consider, `How do people use language,' " Middleton says. "There will be some examples where you need to make significant changes from one market to the next."

>Strategy #3. SEM by country

The keywords become language-specific and sometimes dialect-specific for campaigns in countries such as France, Japan, China, India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. Middleton and her team employ search partners (see hotlinks below) to hone in on their international target markets, but she advises to do as much of the work in-house as possible.

"You can't rely on your search partner to automatically optimize this area," she says. "You have to keep your team attentive to linguistic issues."

>Strategy #4. Organize special offers

One of the later pieces Middleton added to the puzzle was the ability to coordinate search buys with campaigns going on in other media. In a general example, they employed the keyword buy "school printer" for back-to-school campaigns.

"We have been able to try more promotions at the local level like, `HP Photosmart 230, $100 off.' Before, these efforts were very disjointed and that hurt our ROI."

>Strategy #5. Regular correspondence

Middleton holds weekly teleconferences with her team, using the meetings to alter campaigns mid-stream when necessary. She also set up formal quarterly reports that show campaign performance on the three tiers of global, regional and country.

"We are making sure that things like special promotions are moving as they should be and we work on improving seasonality."

Middleton offered five search tips for huge organizations:

Tip #1. Cover all of your bases and do not solely focus on purchase components. All of our data shows that if you do that, you will sell yourself short. You will have a better ROI if you look at all layers.

Tip #2. Don't forget that your search customers are seeking knowledge. What we need to remember is that people are not just find out there to find a bargain.

Tip #3. Take what you know about merchandising at your Web site and integrate it into your search campaigns.

Tip #4. Don't forget metrics. Look how things perform last quarter versus this one and last year versus the current. There are important seasonality differences. You start to see trends that prove themselves out from a seasonality standpoint.

Tip #5. Follow customers through the funnel and their buying cycles for accessory products.

During the last year, Middleton has been able to reign in her division's sprawled-out search initiative, giving it not only uniformity. They have implemented profitable, time-specific campaigns in 11 countries because of the strategies put in place.

"We have seen our online revenue go up because of our improved search," she says. "The sum total effect of implementing those three layers has enabled our ROI needle to noticeably move in the right direction continuously. In addition, we've absolutely increased keyword coverage on position. Mainly, I think we've improved the customer experience."

However, Middleton warns marketers taking over far-reaching search initiatives against hoping for a quick fix. "One of the things I always tell my peers is to not give up hope. The longer you do this, the more information you get and the more you can adjust your campaigns, programs or model. You can turn that data into insight that actually affects marketing and ROI."

Note: This article references several speakers from ad:tech conferences. For information about future shows, visit http://www.ad-tech.com.

Behavioral Targeting Nirvana

3 Steps to Targeting Nirvana

Behavioral targeting can be hit or miss. Here's how to sift through a lot of dirt to find the nuggets of gold.
There's plenty of evidence of behavioral targeting's ability to help build brands and drive direct response, as well as add significant value to publishers' excess inventory. And there are lots of good ideas for distinguishing one form of behavioral targeting from another and knowing when and how to apply each.
What is less well understood is that the typical campaign requires publishers to burn up a lot of inventory in pursuit of an advertiser's elusive targets. To use an eco-unfriendly illustration, it's like killing an elephant for its ivory tusks and throwing away the rest.
Behavioral targeting works best when advertisers have access to an enormous amount of inventory -- more than any single network can deliver efficiently.
Most of us have cookies on our computers that mark us to be targeted as users with certain interests, customer histories and purchase intentions. Point your browser to a site where a network that cookied you also has an inventory relationship, and you may receive a targeted ad. This depends on whether there is a targeted ad available that can be delivered by that network for that category at that time and in that ad size and position.
Those are a lot of variables, and it's no small feat to find them aligned in one place at the right time.
In this article, I'll explain why much of behavioral targeting is hit or miss, describe a better way, and lay out the requirements for achieving your goals.
BT today: hit or missParadise found: targeting without wasteRequirement 1: an open marketplaceRequirement 2: an open technology platformRequirement 3: an open mind