The Conversion Scientist ARCHIVE™

What Can We Learn From the Web Sites of Behavioral Marketing Vendors?

There is a great deal of information, but you have to decipher the code.

In my ClickZ column this month, The Language of Behavioral Marketing Part 1, I explore the Web sites of many of the popular behavioral marketing vendors looking for clues to help me put them in buckets. This is the first in a two-part series that seeks to clear the fog that lies over the industry.

Behavioral marketing vendors aren’t the only businesses whose Web sites need some help.

I hold forth that the Web sites of the industry make these mistakes:

• Everyone’s a Leader
• Shooting at the "Other Guys"
• Everyone Does Everything
• Valueless Value Propositions
• Playing It Safe

I also throw in a few honorable mentions for sites that take a more daring approach in an effort to communicate their value to the marketplace.

Applying the Scientific Method to your Behavioral Marketing

Scientific Method? Hey, I’m a Conversion Scientist

As you learned in a previous post, I’m just wired to see the world through the scientific method. It get’s extreme.

In this month’s ClickZ Behavioral Marketing Experts column, I apply it to behavioral advertising. The thing I love about the scientific method is that it quickly exposes the challenges in your marketing campaign. Behavioral Marketing is a Conversion Scientists dream, but it poses some challenges when developing hypotheses and figuring out "why" something worked or didn’t work.

The bottom line: don’t just ask your behavioral advertising partner about their technology, methodology and ad network. Ask about the ways they interface with you to ensure you’re getting the best information when investigating, hypothesizing, testing and evaluating.

ClickZ: Behavioral Marketing and the Scientific Method

Behavioral Targeting Lullaby

What if George Carlin had riffed on behavioral targeting?

In doing the research for my new ClickZ column on behavioral marketing, I became fascinated by all that could be measured and inferred about me from the simple act of visiting a Web page. The agents at work when you visit a Web site are an invisible Pixel and something called a Cookie. Then the marketers, advertisers, publishers, scientists and statisticians go to work on the data, divining what they can from it about you and what ads you want to see.

The list, which you will find on ClickZ.com, is long, ironic, funny and sometimes disturbing. It’s exactly the kind of thing that needs a Carlinesque treatment.

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Try as I might, I’m no George Carlin. Here’s the real deal. Warning: Explicit Language