Web Analytics & Consumer Segments, work together?

Hello all, so this might not be on your radar but I have recently been reading and thinking a lot about behavioral marketing because with today’s market getting so personalized, targeting can provide marketers with the ability to reach desired segments outside of contextually relevant messaging. Clickz defines behavioral marketing as “targeting consumers based on their behavior on Web sites, rather than purely by the content of pages they visit. Behavioral marketers target consumers by serving ads to predefined segments or categories. These are built with data compiled from clickstream data and IP information.” However, for you traditional marketers out there this is something that you have been practicing for years with consumer segments.

Question is how to bring both worlds together to provide the ultimate experience for the user and of course make our execs smile. So I was going through my reader (love this tool by the way) when I ran into Gary Angels, from Semphonic, blog and he provided some great post on the mindset of a project and the challenges that lie ahead. If you have never dipped into the world of consumer segments or persona’s let me take you on a quick tour, then I will follow up in another post with what Gary recommend. I have tried to make the steps simple but be aware that this is hard stuff folks and usually done by people who are mathematic genius (if you don’t have the resources in house I would strongly recommend you get outside help to handle the complex clustering that go along understanding demographic and psychographic variables of your company’s customers.)

• Identify your target audience
• Employ Primary research (using only the best methods to reach and question)
• Use pre-existing panels, with some targeting/ qualifying questions that cover key demographics and attitudinal information
• Analyze Respondent data
• Set of scores for each respondent assigns them to a unique group
• Descriptive business names and rich descriptions are then created to provide a framework for a wide range of marketing activities

So now you got part one over with, but what about the online variable you ask about whom we typically know nothing about. Well, here to get a useful behavioral segmentation (pages viewed, time on site, visits and sometimes geo-demographic variables like IP-based DMA) you need to look at a different set of variables such as:

• Set of behavioral facts about a visitor is which topics they consume and how much of each topic they consume.
• Navigational sources (search, directory, link-drives, images, etc.) they use and what type of sessions they typically have. (converting or non)
Now you got part two over with, so the million dollar question being “what now”? For the sake of not scaring anyone with the length of this post, I will break this into two parts. The next post will go over what Gary Angel recommend and have some sprinkles of Avinash’s Trinity Model. So stayed tuned!