Offermatica’s Behavioral Targeting by Personal Affinity

Back in January I posted the great results OTTO Digital was having with clients using Offermatica to behaviorally target content based on user defined affinity and the advantages this solution has over classic BT technology employed on the ad serving side of the world. Things have gone so well using this technique (also known as on-site targeting) that over the past six months this has developed in to a full product feature of the Offermatica platform. The release of Offermatica’s Affinity Targeting solution has (rightfully) created a bit of buzz in the blogosphere and media so I though that I might post some additional thoughts on it.

Affinity marketing has long been a strategy of marketers to target consumers based on established patterns or action based segmentation. What the Offermatica tool does is based on marketer-controlled rules, automatically create these action based segments of users and then target marketer defined content to them. The core of this feature is the algorithm that measures and creates these segments by weighing the strength of the affinity for each user based on click behavior and patterns over time that we’ve seen matter for conversion (and few have more data on what matters for conversion than we do at Offermatica).

While what’s under the hood is complex, from a strategy and execution point of view the feature is remarkable in its simplicity. It’s easy to set-up these campaigns in the tool and easy to strategize. What makes the strategy so simple is that user engagement and conversion behavior speaks to their interests. This makes personalization easy to execute.

There are so many affinities that can be used to target users with relevance. A few that we’ve used with great performance results are:

• Price Sensitivity
• Brand Affinity
• Product Affinity
• Image Preference
• Content Affinity

My favorite part of using Offermatica to do this Behavioral Targeting is that the targeted content segment can always have a control sub-segment that does not receive the targeted content. This helps validate the segments in a controlled test environment, shows the lift in doing this targeting and allows for testing creative. In short, the feature accomplishes all parts of the troika of targeting strategy:

The 3 Keys to Effective Targeting Strategy

1. Segment Creation
2. Segment Validation
3. Targeting

Everyone has preferences. That is human nature. Users help inform us of their preferences based on visit and click data. The ability to make this visit and click-stream information actionable and deliver relevant content to users either in session or on a follow-up visit creates a better experience for the user and better results for business. Publishers and retailers both stand to benefit from this ability to easily deliver relevance to users based on the most important aspect to successful marketing…what we know.