Amadesa

As I browse my favorite ecommerce websites both as a customer and as an optimization manager, I constantly find myself presented with the ubiquitous “rotating banner promotion area”. We have all seen these. Take a moment and browse through some of the top 500 Internet retailers, and you’ll know what I mean. Common design/functional elements include fade in/fade out transitions, pause buttons and quick navigation to the next offer.

Don’t get me wrong, rotating promotion areas have several good characteristics, including but not limited to:

• Presenting fresh content that may appeal to a wide percentage of the population
• Presenting multiple offers, product and product categories within the same area
• Creating a more interactive look and feel for the functionality and design of the site

One major shortcoming is that the banner is not ‘intelligent’. It does not know where I have clicked, what product categories I am interested in, where I came from, etc. While promotion banners may rotate 2-5 offerings, they are static; they do not evolve with my interests, browsing patterns and may not present me with the most relevant piece of content.

Enter Amadesa’s Onsite Behavioral Targeting

While Behavioral Targeting does not know who I am or what I look like, it does know hundreds of anonymous user characteristics that make up my ‘browsing identity’. Once enough characteristics are accumulated, real world models are created to predict what each user prefers when visiting a website. User preference is dictated by the click; the yes or no action related to relevancy, interest and user engagement.

Prerequisites For Behavioral Targeting

Traffic

Since Behavioral Targeting relies on data, high traffic site areas will see the greatest impact. Examples include homepage promotion areas, category headers, site search results pages, etc. That being said, Behavioral Targeting can work wonders on sites with as little as 1,000 daily visitors.

Content variations

Depending on your site, you will have many different types of users. Some that are looking for specific products, some that are looking for product categories, users that are influenced by price, promotions or emotion. Take this into consideration when planning and creating your Behavioral Targeting content variations. You will want each variation to relate to a specific category of your site in addition to highlighting price, promotion and/or the emotional benefit. The goal is to create a wide variety of content variations that appeal to a wide selection of your audience. Once BT is enabled, the engine will start to serve the most relevant content version to each individual.

Apply Behavioral Targeting to a rotating promotion area

Using HP.com as an example, their current site has a rotating banner of 3 distinctive content types – a laptop, desktop and ink for color printers:

Rather than having all three variations contained within one rotating graphic, we will want to break each highlight into its’ own content variation. End result is 3 unique variations that will be uploaded to the Behavioral Targeting Engine:

(The navigation elements within the bottom left of the graphic should be removed as they are no longer relevant)

In addition to these content variations, I would recommend that HP add other variations that appeal to other users – Small business, graphic artists, peripherals, users in need of support, users interested in connecting with others, etc. Once all content variations are uploaded to the Amadesa Customer Experience Suite, you’re ready to go live (assuming site category tags are in place)!

Behavioral Targeting will start to serve all content variations at random, and once enough data is collected, each user will start to be targeted with the right content.

Other topics of interest relating to Amadesa's Onsite Behavioral Targeting:

Read about the official launch of Amadesa's automated, site-side Behavioral Targeting capability:
http://www.amadesa.com/company/news/amadesa-adds-site-side-behavioral-ta...

Behavioral Targeting Product Overview Page:
http://amadesa.com/products/behavioral-targeting

Want to talk about creating intelligent promotional areas on your site with Behavioral Targeting? Want to understand potential conversion rate and revenue impacts with Amadesa’s Saas solution? Drop me an email, or contact us.