The previous post had concrete recommendations for proving the ROI of behavioral targeting. Several smart reader comments brought together a pretty clear picture.

However, when I was meeting with a number of experienced online bankers in Europe recently, the question that I received was more difficult to answer than just proving the ROI of targeting.

Namely, the question was whether one can expect greater ROI from testing or targeting? Whichever promises greater ROI, shouldn’t that be where you may want to start?

Thinking about it in terms of anecdotal results

Testing tends to be much more black and white in outcomes when you first begin to optimize a website. After all, no perfect website falls from the sky. At first you can get a big impact from making changes to messaging, calls-to-acton, layout, etc.

There are case studies, e.g. from Unica web analytics customers, where website conversions were improved by as much as 1900% over time with the help of continuous testing, measurement, and improvement.

It is often said that building (or proving) the business case for (site-side) behavioral targeting has been a lot harder than justifying an investment in more straight forward site optimization techniques such as A/B testing.

As a result, you can read independent industry analyst reports observing that some applications that can do testing and targeting (hint, hint) are a lot more frequently used for just testing rather than targeting today.

You can even hear from some of the best known and experienced consultants in the online optimization industry that they don’t feel convinced by the business case for (site-side) behavioral targeting because they feel it is less clear cut vs. testing.

This doesn’t need to stay this way.

The problem is that we have been asking the wrong question.

The question should not be “proving the business case for behavioral targeting”. But we need to make the question specific to the use case for targeting that the marketer wishes to pursue / prioritize.

That is to say, we need to seek the business case for using behavioral targeting technology to do one or multiple of the following things:

It used to be that SEM was the umbrella term for paid and organic. Articles on search would begin with a sentence such as “Search engine marketing (SEM) comes in two types: paid (PPC) and organic (SEO).”. I used to abbreviate that as “SEM=PPC+SEO”.

But something changed in the past 3-12 months.

Now, most articles seem to explain SEM as “search marketing” and equate it only with paid search. You read sentences such as “SEO is going like this and that, whereas SEM (search marketing) is going … (wherever Google and Facebook are going)”.

That seems wrong on so many levels

What? Organic search is not “marketing”?

If PPC is Search Marketing, then what is SEO? An IT function?

That's baloney.

You might be squandering a huge opportunity if you aren’t using web analytics as a rich source of behavioral insights on individual prospects and customers.

Read the full article published on the brilliant new online-behavior site. There you’ll also see uses of Venn diagrams for behavioral analytics that are more serious than the recent fun with the nerd vs. geeks Venn diagram post.

Kudos to Daniel Waisberg for launching online-behavior.com!

Social CRM has just gone from being a buzz word to being an official software solutions category: Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant for Social CRM!

On that occasion, let me post the Q&A from our recent webinar with Radian6′s Lauren Vargas below. The replay of the webinar is available to Web Analytics Association members from the webcast archive.

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Which kind of organizations are ready for social CRM?

Lauren: Any organization willing to listen and participate in a two-way dialog are ready for social media engagement.

Social media is another business channel, but the thought process to accept this conflicts with many organization cultures. Invest in education, time and resources for your social media efforts and ensure your success and lessons learned go from campaign to program commitment.

Akin: Additionally, there is a side to social CRM that is about marketing automation. E.g. registered site visitors who are not only readers but contributors on a company’s branded community site could be prioritized for special offers. Going to this step requires an organization where the customer marketers have built up expertise on marketing automation (often the case) and where they are cooperating with the web and social media team (not as often the case as should be).

Ever since the brilliant Nerd-Geek-Dork Venn diagram below started zipping all over blogs in Sept 2009, I have been waiting for genius to strike me so that I might think of ways to apply this to the analytics topic.

Sadly, genius never struck.

But here are a few venn diagrams anyway that kind-of, sort-of make sense and contain a few useful reminders.

The Analyst vs. Change Agent Venn Diagram

A good reminder how critical both business acumen and political skills are so that analyst can be the change agents that they so much desire to be.

The Segmentation to Recommendation Venn Diagram

A good reminder how critical segmentation is to analysis because static reports probably never tell a story that leads to action. Good reminder also that the true goal of analysis is to get to recommendations as Eric Peterson was pointing out in his keynote at the eMeterics Marketing Innovation Summit conference in San Jose in May.

Like most vendors at the eMetrics marketing optimization conference this year, I only had a chance to attend very few of the sessions. But each of the ones I did attend was awesome.

Even more awesome than I remember from past years.

Here are five track sessions that were real gems:

The team at Online Marketing with RSS Ray kindly invited me to present on BrightTALK yesterday on five ways to increase returns from SEM.

This was a welcome opportunity for me to detail my recommendations for how to optimize search engine marketing from end-to-end rather than focusing only on search bid management and SEO.

If you are new to online or search marketing, you will hopefully find this a useful intro to help you plan your optimization efforts. If you are already experienced in online marketing, especially SEM, then the only useful piece for you in this presentation will be a reminder that SEM optimization requires you to take a complete view.

Otherwise, the weakest link in the chain will break your ROI.

So much has been written about our little world of web analytics, that it is getting increasingly difficult to come up with useful new contributions.
But the Beyond Web Analytics trio, Adam Greco, James Dutton, and Rudi Shumpert, managed to do just that. Their series of podcasts featured past guests such as Gary Angel, Jim Sterne, John Lovett, Josh Manion, Greg Dowling, and others.
So, I was honored to be next as their guest. In the podcast that Rudi published today, we discussed many recipes for web analysis ranging from the web analytics wizards, to the desire for ever smarter web analytics tools, and more.

I must admit, I feel a bit tickled like Elmo to see podcasts on our nerdy subject show up within cool places such as iTunes.
Listen online here.

In hindsight, the experience reminds me of something my grandfather used to say:  Everybody, once a week, should visit one hospital and one cemetery so to get a better perspective on what they are doing with their own life and healthy years.

Well, for any of us that work in the world of big enterprise software and SaaS solutions, a similar recommendation would be worthwhile:

Pay a visit to a small business regularly!

No, no …, not to appreciate better being in the big company world with a fancy office coffee machine.

But to keep us down to Earth in our recommendations. Enterprises have more man power and resources than small businesses - but as advisers our recommendations still need to be feasible and not pie in the sky.

So, what did I have to recommend that the captain of a small business operating their web based business from their home office could use to turn out better business results?