Landing pages and behavioral targeting
Scott Brinker on Monday, August 3, 2009 at 08:51AM This morning, MediaPost published an article of mine, Interest vs. Intent and Landing Pages. Since MediaPost frequently covers behavioral targeting, it seemed like the right venue to raise this issue.
While there are plenty of discussions about behavioral targeting, most of them revolve around the advertising. Once you’ve identified someone — you have what you believe is a pretty good guess of their intent — you then dynamically adjust the advertising they see elsewhere to cater to that intent.
Unfortunately, that assumption of identified “intent” is a big leap. More likely, the advertiser has merely identified “interest” — which might have a broad set of motivations and perspectives behind it.
Interest versus intent is not a semantic nit-pick. If you lend any credence to the AIDAS (attention, interest, desire, action, satisfaction) model — it’s not perfect, but many successful marketing and sales programs have been built on it — then you recognize that moving from interest to desire takes a little work. Sometimes it takes a lot of work.
To uncover intent, you really need a dialogue.
Which leads me to two important topics about behavioral targeting that don’t get nearly enough attention:
How do you really uncover someone’s intent? One school of thought uses statistical algorithms to guess based on the collective sum of all clicks and page views you’ve tracked for a particular user. However, this can be fuzzy or inaccurate — especially if you only have a small sample of data on someone. A much better approach is to actively engage someone in a short and mutually productive dialogue using landing pages and conversion paths. This is directed behavioral segmentation, and it lets you genuinely identify intent in a click or two. It’s not a statistical guess; it’s an explicit, transparent, and incentivized case of self-identification. (See Justin’s chocolaty example from last week.)
How well do you follow through on behaviorally targeted ads? Once you’ve identified intent from a previous interaction, and you initiate behavioral targeting for subsequent ads that the user sees, how do you handle subsequent click-throughs? If you aren’t taking that opportunity to engage the respondent with a very specific landing page at that point — one that acknowledges the respondent and their intent as important to you, picking up where the last dialogue left off — then you’re wasting much of the behavioral momentum that you worked so hard to achieve.
As I mentioned last month, landing page optimization shouldn’t just be about optimizing one particular page. It should also be about optimizing your engagement with particular audience segments, different campaigns, and your overall online marketing operations.
Not coincidentally, the same applies to behavioral targeting. It shouldn’t be relegated to an in-the-weeds tactic of specific ads, but rather viewed a holistic opportunity to optimize your marketing writ large.
Read the complete MediaPost article here.
Landing Pages, conversions, optimization in Strategy 
Reader Comments (6)
Nice informative blog thanks for posting :)
The second pointfollowing through on behaviorally targeted advertisements with specific ads that are consistent with the intention of their actions is known as congruency. Online people searching for solutions expect the ads to be congruent with the landing page and all communication should be congruent with what the landing page promises otherwise it is considered SPAM.
One more brilliant post on landing pages. Thanks.
I m sure this is good to ask your visitors what can be changed, and what they like the most or something :))
wow...man...You have really given gold mine for affiliates. Really nice and helpful tips for easy SEO. I really appreciate your job and thanks you many...many....
also, nice description for landing pages, please provide some easy to build landing page or offer some free ready made material for affiliates.