Dynamic Segmentation (La Nouvelle Vague)

I’ve always loved segmentation. One of the keys to the
success of my first web business and the number one reason we survived the dotcom
bubble was that we segmented our email list like crazy. Every supplement
purchased qualified you for a segment. We knew the categories you were
interested in and what products within those categories. We also knew what days
worked best to send the emails to in each segment. Weight loss was sent on
Mondays, bodybuilding on Fridays. This built an insanely successful email
program despite the fact I knew nothing about online marketing back then. Relevantly
segmenting, testing and targeted emails just made business sense — and the web
made it easy.

But Email is generally a static environment. The rest of the
web is not. In the 12 years since that first segmentation strategy I have
learned quite a bit about segmentation. One of the most important things I
learned about is the dynamic nature of segments.

Segments are malleable. They can be shaped based on any
number of factors and those shapes can change based on look-back or realtime.
They can also have sub-segments — literally segments of segments. As every
Search marketer knows the success of segmentation is finding the optimal blend
variables from which to form your segment. Most targeting success is predicated
on how well you can do this. How well you can do this is based on the data you
are using to support making your decisions. This is the gravitational force of
segmentation optimization.

In my experience many SEMs fail because it is incredibly
difficult to deal with all the segment variables in a dynamic data environment and a dynamic marketplace. It’s harder still
when your success is only measured against your own metrics and not the metrics
of others. I’ve never been a fan of benchmarks (most people use these to create
“good enough” goals) but hey, at least it’s something to measure against.

That brings us to my current segmentation obsession,
Display.

The emerging display ecosystem is being built on the back of
data from any number of sources and like Search this data is being used to
create segments. In fact, Display is opening up data and pricing in a way
Search never did and never will. With that comes a giant market risk. Sometimes
I think the whole “display new wave” is a crazy idea but like Jean-Paul Belmond
in Goddard’s Breathless there is no
turning back. The current environment was killing display and when you ain’t
got nothing you got nothin’ to lose.

How does it feel? The entire remarketing / cookie market is based
on segmentation as a proxy for audience buying. Display now uses words like
targeting, addressable, personal, one-to-one and realtime. All these are based
on one very simple idea – creating a segment to target more relevant
advertising against. Still, collecting data is actually a very small part of ensuring
success. Optimizing segments is where dreams are found and lost.

As hard as the opaque market of Search is, it is
self-contained. In many respects that makes optimization easier than in Display.
In my opinion (and there will be more than a few start-ups that disagree with
me) truly optimizing segments (to the
point of diminishing returns) across an ad exchange or a network is a Google
level problem. Much easier is looking at segmentation at another self-contained
environment  – the site. This is
one key reason why our analytics focus at Yieldbot begins with the site data
and our targeting focus ends at the site visitor.

Make no mistake, brand or performance, there will continue
to be less and less media spend on irrelevance and a more and more spending on
relevance. Segments are created for the simple purpose of delivering relevance.
Every web business, be it advertising or publishing, needs to have more than data.
The dynamic nature of the web requires systems that can both optimize and make
actionable the data in ways as dynamic as the web itself. Welcome to the new
wave.

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