Using Technology to Assist in eCommerce Targeting
September 14th, 2009If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
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Guest post by Craig Smith of Trinity Insight
Within the Ecommerce marketplace, new technologies have been developed to assist online retailers in properly messaging content and promotions to different users. These "targeting" solutions help improve the "holy grail" metric of conversion and should be evaluated and potentially included within your store.
What these types of offerings provide is the ability to customize a user session based upon data that is stored within the user cookie. Without diving into the ins and outs of cookies and their functionality, essentially cookies allow a web browser to decipher the geo-location of a user, if a user has been to a site previously, as well as what pages the user has been to and where the user dropped off.
This information can be very powerful when properly leveraged. Here’s an example:
Let’s say you are ToysRus.com. You obviously have stores across the entire USA and a variety of products and brands to promote. How do you know which to utilize on the homepage and how do you proactively promote your stores within the user experience? Easy, use dynamic targeting!
So lets say a customer comes to the site and leaves from the "Elmo" category page. The customer is also from Philadelphia. By using dynamic targeting solutions, on that customer’s subsequent visit, you can promote an Elmo promotion on the homepage for a hot item as well as message in-store promotions that correlate to the users closest store.
To the user, the targeting is not really comprehended – they likely think the site is just smart and better meeting their needs and desires. They have no idea of what is going on behind the scenes.
Dynamic targeting is best utilized for:
Search term targeting (branded terms versus non-branded)
New versus returning (offer promos or codes to new visitors)
Clickstream milestones (cart abandonment solutions)
Geographic IP (the "store location" example used above)
All of these components allow an eCommerce business to deliver a site presentation that is better suited to convert. With bounce rates at homepages exceeding 40% for most retailers, its painfully true that users have short attention spans.
By providing an approach of personalized content, you can capture their interest, and then work to make the sale through great site performance, clear messaging, engaging calls to action, and a seamless checkout process.
About Author: Craig Smith is the founder of Trinity Insight, a leading eCommerce consulting company
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I think it is essential to do such as this, its a great way to target potential customers
I think that empathetic attention to customer details is essential & can add value to readers as well as business. It’s effective & worth. What’s most important question is how well do you understand your niche?
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What can you keep on doing regularly for them?
Thank you for this useful guide. I think it will help me to improve the profits of my e-commerce store. I will follow your post regularly for future useful tips. Thank you and keep up with the good work.
Genuis idea, i will be doing something like this
Thanks for sharing the information about e commerce technology and yes i agree with you its a good way to promote the customer.. Nice pOst Pls keep it up
right mix up of Technology and eCommerce is deadly combination provided you know how to go about it.
-Shanker Bakshi
I’d really like to revisit some scripts I started to do dynamic targeting based on the keywords used to get to my site, plus, put some real time learning all intricacies of analytics and funnels.
great article
Andy Bailey´s last blog ..Worldwide CommentLuv search engine trawling over 150,000 CommentLuv Enabled Sites
The Technology in today’s world is assisting the expansion of commerce online. The availability of products and comparison of products among different vendors makes it possible for the customer to choose the most cost effective and good vendor.
[...] be evaluated and potentially included within your store.Prescription Sunglasses (2 comments.), Stephan Miller, Sep [...]
I think the biggest/best way to leverage that technology is to do what vendors like Amazon does, providing similar products or other people that liked X have also liked y.
I think that empathetic attention to customer details is essential & can add value to readers as well as business. It’s effective & worth. What’s most important question is how well do you understand your niche?
Nice Places´s last blog ..Nice Places to Visit’s List
Technology plays a great role in e-commerce and no wonder anyone can do shopping at comfort of their mobile phones.
Awesome Guide, this is good…
That’s a useful tool, it’s nice if we can use a tool to its maximum ability.
muxin´s last blog ..Retirement Plan
Awesome Guide, this is good…
I believe the best way to improve bounce rate is to match titles and descriptions with content better. Also making your visitor feel secure is a must.
It’s a good idea in theory, but really you’ve got to be careful against simplifying the customer profile too much. I presume I’m not the only one who finds the recommended products by Amazon to be quite irrelevant? After all, I’m not just buying for myself, but for others, but what may seem relevant for the others isn;t very relevant to myself. 2c.
This is a great and sophisticated innovation ….
journal freeware´s last blog ..My diary by wareconsult.com
This is very interesting technology which is certainly out of my grasp at present. I am hoping however that in the not too distant future I will be able to implement these types of technologies on my store.
Great Post! I think equally important is being able to measure the effectiveness of dynamic targeting. Having experienced this first hand, I think this can be a risky trap if one doesn’t have the tools or ability to understand what type of targeting is working well and what is not. Google analytics multi-variate testing is a good way to measure some of these techniques.
Darpan Munjal´s last blog ..Top 10 Low Cost Ways To Improve Site Usability
it is a good text.
With website visitors and buyers refusing to spend time surfing through unnecessary information and with the competition trying to woo each of your buyer by giving them what they want in better shape, size and TAT, it becomes important for any business to focus on providing the best in the least possible time duration.
It is in such scenarios that such applications come in handy.
R Kumar´s last blog ..Twitter introduces Twitter Lists
Bounce rates are a huge issue and I’ve had mixed responses with this, but in general i find that the quality of the information on a site really makes a difference to visitor attention spans.