Amadesa

Amadesa's own CEO, Rita Brogley, guides you through easy steps to get started with behavioral targeting on SEJournal: http://bit.ly/9J68oM

Segmentation (targeting specific messages to pre-defined segments) is a powerful, widely used personalization methodology. In fact, a recent Forrester report indicated that 95% of marketers surveyed either currently use or plan to use segmentation within the next twelve months to deliver targeted content to their customers.

"Personalization" is an oft-used term that generates plenty of buzz but leaves website owners struggling to succinctly define it. As a normal course of my day, I enjoy the opportunity to discuss these concepts with customers and listen to their responses, of which are varied and typically include 'Amazon-ish' or 'Netflix-ish' as a descriptor. Here at Amadesa, we provide a suite of personalization products and I would like to take a few minutes of your time to outline how we see the personalization landscape.

John Lovett, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, recently published a research report titled “Sharpening Web Site Relevance.” It is available at Forrester’s web site (registration/purchase required), and provides a great perspective on how important it is to approach web site optimization from the customer’s perspective.

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.

We all know the story of Dorothy and the yellow brick road… all she had to do was “follow, follow, follow, follow” right? Wrong. Dorothy ran into a lot of obstacles trying to get to the emerald city. That can be the case for users on your Web site. All they want to do is follow along and get the information they are seeking, but often times we as designers/marketers put obstacles in their way.

Segmentation is no doubt a vital next step in your optimization effort, if you are not doing it already. By far, this can be one of your best strategies, by helping you focus on visitors that are more important to your business and creating content that is more directly relevant to them. Everybody is recommending it, and it makes sense – dividing your visitors into groups by interest and creating and delivering the information to best suit their needs. But damn, why does it have to be so hard? Did all the people recommending it and talking about it ever think of what it takes to segment traffic on a site?