Have you been hearing a lot about behavioral targeting lately? If so, you might want to get the inside scoop on what it is and how it works.

Are you interested in learning more about behavioral targeting? Then check out this post. Or, click the image above and be taken to the Behavioral Targeting video on the 60 Second Marketer YouTube channel.

Essentially, behavioral targeting is a way for marketers to serve relevant ads to people surfing the web. As an example, if you’re in the market for a convertible, you may have visited AutoTrader.com or clicked another website’s banner ad for a Chrysler Sebring Convertible.

What happened next?

Well, ads for convertibles started to crop up when you visited ESPN.com, Time.com or even blogs that you read.

That’s behavioral targeting. It’s a technique where marketers track statistical data about websites people visit so that they can serve up ads that are more relevant to them.

(By the way, you can disable this from happening simply by deleting your cookies.)

Now, before you get all up-in-arms about privacy issues, there are a few things you should know. For starters, the data is statistical data, not private data. In other words, the data that is tracked is simply ones and zeros on a massive database, not “John Smith at 123 Ivy Street did a search for Viagra.”

Secondly, it’s important to remember that the direct mail industry has been using this technique for 50 years. When you receive a direct mail letter or a catalog or a postcard from a local business, you’re receiving it because someone in the direct response industry has tracked your purchasing behaviors.

In similar fashion, people in the digital marketing industry can track your online behavior. The result, in my opinion, is that this process actually improves your experience on the web because it makes it more relevant.

There are people who will disagree with me on that, of course.

If you’d like to take a deeper dive into behavioral targeting, you can watch the 60 Second Video below. It’s packed with additional tips and information about the process.

And, by the way, when you click the video below, you can rest assured that we aren’t tracking your viewing habits.

We would if we could. But we’re not.

Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. YouTube tracks your viewing habits and we do check those out occasionally. But all we know is your geographic data and that’s pretty much it.

And your address. We know that.

And your phone number.

And your shoe size.

I’m kidding.

Enjoy the video.

Not long ago, we asked Raphael Ravilla at BKV Digital and Direct Response to tell us what he knew about Behavioral Targeting, one of the newer and more interesting aspects of online marketing.
Raphael wrote a post for the 60 Second Marketer, which is summarized below. We used what he taught us about this new and innovative technique in a 60 second video, which is also included here.

Here’s what Raphael wrote for the 60 Second Marketer a short while ago:
“Have you ever shopped online at a particular site and noticed that, after your visit to that site, you’re seeing that company’s banner ads everywhere, almost as if they’re following you?

More likely than not, they are following you. If the store has a robust behavioral marketing strategy, then you’re being presented ads that are related to the pages you visited on the previous site you visited. They may also present ads to you based on what you may or may not have purchased on the site.

How does this work? The company has placed numerous “action tags” across its site—in category pages (or store isles) and through the shopping cart process. They know what you browsed, and if you bought the product, or if you abandoned. They can then serve you ads encouraging you to reconsider the product you didn’t buy. They can even serve you ads that are related to the products that you have just purchased.

The ads that you see are visible on their site, and throughout the web. If it’s a large corporation, they’ve probably purchased billions of impressions used to re-market to people like you for upsell and cross-sell purposes.
Do you have a site and want to do the same thing? The conversion rate lift is quoted by some at over ten times regular non-behaviorally-targeted ads.

Here’s how to do it:
Identify pages in your site you want to “tag.” Usually, it is the homepage, the category top-pages and sub-pages and finally, the entire shopping cart process. You can overlay and mix/match the tags to define audience buckets. You can use either a third party action tag, or an action tag from an ad-network.
Now, you’ll need traffic: Use all forms of media to drive site visits and you will soon be collecting “cookies” that you can segment and re-market to.”
How do you re-market? Go through the ad-network that supplied you the action tags and they can help you create your behaviorally-targeted campaigns.”
Behavioral targeting is one of the newer ways marketers can supercharge their marketing campaigns. What are some other new tools? Let us know and we’ll write a post about it.

Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer, the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine of BKV Digital and Direct Response.

Social media is getting a great deal of buzz these days. But CEOs, CFOs and CMOs are all asking the same question, “How can I measure a social media campaign?”

Well, there’s good news. Despite what some people will tell you, social media can be measured in a very tangible, specific way. But the first thing you have to do is figure out what you want to measure. Do you want to measure the dialogue about your brand? Or do you want to measure the dollars generated from the campaign? (Of course, you could always measure both, which is the best approach.)

To help us get a better understanding of this, we sat down with Raphael Rivilla, who runs the Interactive Media department at BKV (one of the sponsors of the 60 Second Marketer). BKV has more experience than most agencies at measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns.

Just what are some of the things that can be measured? With a little homework, Raphael and his team can tell you the following:

• The positive/negative split about your brand in places like Twitter, the blogosphere, LinkedIn, Facebook, User Forums, etc.
• The specific, relevant comments made about your brand on blogs, Twitter and other social media sites
• The demographics of the people within your “community”
• The percentage of your community who have active internet profiles
• The percentage of names in your database with active internet profiles
• A breakdown of users who have 1 to 7+ internet profiles
• The percentage of users who are using widgets
• A gender analysis of your customers across social media websites like Amazon, Flikr, MySpace, etc.
• An age analysis
• A geo-location analysis

But if you’re just measuring the dialogue, then you’re only accomplishing half of the task. The second (and more important) task is measuring the dollars generated by the campaign. According to BKV, not only is this possible, but once you measure how many prospects converted, you can to wag your finger in the CFO’s face and say, “See, I told you. Social media is measurable!”

(We wouldn’t actually recommend wagging your finger in your CFO’s face, but you get the idea.)

Here are just some of the things BKV can measure with regards to the conversion of your prospects to customers:

• Which set of websites, social media sites and blogs converted the most customers from your behavioral targeting campaign
• How many prospective customers opened, click-through and converted on an email campaign
• Which website landing page converted the most customers and why
• What “real estate” on an email was the most valuable. In other words, which space converted more prospects — the “free shipping” space or the “save 10% on blue widgets” space
• How many customers converted from a paid search campaign and which version of the campaign outperformed the other
• How people navigated through your site. Where did they get stuck? Where did they actually convert?

There are a number of ways to measure a social media campaign. But the starting point is to decide what it is you want to measure — do you want to measure the dialogue about your brand? Or do you want to measure the dollars generated by your campaign? Or do you want to measure both?

Once you’ve got that figured out, the rest is easy.

Well, it’s not easy. But it’s easier.

Recently, The 60 Second Marketer conducted a free webinar on Social Media. In the webinar, we discussed several of the new tools, tips and techniques people are using to help promote their products and/or services.

There are hundreds of different Social Media tools available, so it’s easy to get confused by all of them. One of the key concepts we discussed was how to categorize these tools so that they’re simpler and easier to use and understand.

There are three primary categories of Social Media — tools that help you network, tools that help you promote and tools that help you share content.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we consider to be the top 13 Social Media tools broken down by category:

Networking tools — These are tools that help you connect with customers and prospects:

• MySpace: Think of MySpace as a social media tool that’s a little like a music festival. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of passion and, unfortunately, a lot of noise. It’s great if you’re targeting the youth market.

• Twitter: Think of Twitter as a cocktail party. There are a lot of different conversations going on and you can move from one conversation to another conversation.

• Facebook: Facebook is like a pub. It’s a great place to meet people on a more casual basis and have relaxed, off-the-record conversations with the people you meet there.

• LinkedIn: Think of LinedIn as a trade show. It’s a little more professional than Facebook and you’ll want to meet and connect with people there in a more businesslike manner.

Promotion Tools — These are tools that help you promote content about your product or service:

• Flickr: A great place to upload photos of your most recent company parties, conventions or product launches. Not the most important tool in the world, but worth checking out.

• Podcasting: Don’t make the mistake of doing a podcast that just regurgitates your press releases. Make your podasts fun, interesting and relevant. Don’t waste your time if you’re just going to have the CEO ramble on about your latest new product launch.

• YouTube: What can we say about YouTube that you don’t already know?

• HowCast: Ahhhhh, here’s something that’s interesting. HowCast feeds “How To” videos to a growing community. Perfect if your product requires a video tutorial.

• TubeMogul: Do you have videos you want to share with the world? Then go to Tubemogul, where you can upload your video once and let them send it out to YouTube, MySpace, Vidder and a gazillion other video sharing services.

Sharing tools — These are tools that help you share content that would be helpful to your prospects or customers:

• Google: You already know about Google, but did you know about Google Alerts? Just plug in a keyword and Google will send you an email a day that lists when that keyword was discussed in a blog. Perfect if you’re interested in staying on-top of things. Also great if you’re a big brand and you want to respond to negative comments about your product or service.

• Blogs: We’re going to do an entire webinar on blogs and blogging in the coming weeks, but for now, remember this — don’t do one unless you can write something relevant at least 4 times a week.

• Article Marketer: Do you have articles that you’d like published around the web? Then check out Article Marketer. We haven’t officially used it, but at first glance, it looks like a very useful tool.

• Digg, Del.icio.us and other bookmarking tools: As you know, these tools allow you to tag articles and other content that you think might be useful for others. We’ve found that it’s best not to abuse these tools or to try to milk them. That’s just abusing the system.

Are there important tools that we’ve missed? Which tools do you use? Share your thoughts and comments on them with our readers!

Everybody from your CEO to your Congressman is asking about Behavioral Targeting. You, of course, know that it’s a way to track web users’ behavior so that you can present them with display banner ads that are relevant and timely.

Recent studies have indicated that a behaviorally-targeted banner campaign can perform 5 to 10 times better than a non-behaviorally-targeted campaign. Amazing stuff.

For an introduction to Behavioral Targeting, check out the 60 second video on our website called — you guessed it — “An Introduction to Behavioral Targeting.” It’ll give you the scoop. Plus, it’s easy to forward to your CEO.

Or your Congressman.