Segmentation is immensely valuable. Behavioral targeting of ads is hot because—surprise, surprise—when you give people more relevant messaging and content, you get better results. A recent Merrill Lynch report estimates the average web advertising CPM rate at $2.50—while reporting that the average CPM for behaviorally targeted ads is $10.
As excited as online marketers are with the promise of behaviorally targeted ads, many businesses overlook the opportunity for segmentation already in their backyard: segmenting respondents on page one of their post-click marketing landing experiences. I think of this as filling the gap between click and conversion in your respondent funnel.
You’re already paying for your existing search, display ad, and email marketing traffic—why not make the most of that spend and turn them into a segmented audience?
Employing directed behavioral segmentation on your landing experiences gives you four immediate advantages:- You can quickly match targeted content to respondents, even if the traffic source was relatively unsegmented.
- Making segmentation transparent to respondents increases accuracy while avoiding the creepiness of a site knowing more about you than you thought you revealed.
- You can run controlled A|B tests on different types of segmentation choices to see what resonates best with your audience. By looking at the correlation of segmentation choices and the traffic sources from which those respondents originated, you can learn which pre-click vehicles resonate with which audience niches.
