So you have your first few rounds of testing done and your digital experience has been tweaked based on the results. You have a pretty good digital experience lined up for your visitors. Now what? The next step is to analyze what your visitors are doing on your site, what they are clicking on, what they’re viewing, and what they are interested in without them having to provide any personally identifiable information (PII). This is all part of behavioral targeting. However, before you can start targeting, you need to start segmenting.
What is real-time segmentation?
Segmentation takes your site visitors and divides them into groups based on similar behavioral, geographic and/or situational similarities. This information helps you understand who is visiting your site, what they are doing, where they are from etc. without the user having to provide any information about themselves.
Marketers have always known that segmentation is important. Most marketing tools are able to segment known users. Real-time segmentation takes into account what anonymous users are doing as they are doing it, across all channels. Users then get classified into one or more segments automatically based on their behavior. Knowing the basics of what both your known users and anonymous users are doing is a good starting point for any marketing campaign. The same holds true for personalization; before you can test effectively you need a baseline of who is on your site and what they’re up to. Broad-based marketing efforts just aren’t going to cut it anymore.
Where does behavioral targeting fit in?
95% of traffic to your website is anonymous hence we call them “users” or “visitors.” In truth they are people. If you don’t know who is coming to your site, how can you provide them with a personalized experience? How can you recommend articles and products to them? How can you show them offers that they might want to take advantage of?