Several privacy groups are calling for a “Do not Track List” to limit behavioral profiling techniques similar to “Do Not Call Lists” that keep those pesky telemarketers from tying up our phone lines. As an employee at Baynote, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t love the idea of recommendations driven by user behaviors. As an online consumer of content and products, the same still holds true. There is simply too much content on the web for purely organic search results and menu navigation. Still, the idea that my entire purchase history and geographic location is tied to me along with other personally identifiable information is pretty eerie.

Fortunately, Baynote Recommendations uses the wisdom of the crowd in such a way that does not rely on this kind of information for intent driven recommendations. Our secret sauce doesn’t require users’ location or personally identifiable information as an ingredient to power our recommendations. Check out how it works here.

If you are ever doing any research around SEO, a principle that you will soon not forget is “content is king.” This phrase must reside on every SEO related article/website known to mankind. In its defense, the phrase is absolutely correct. Having good content on your website is more important than anything else. Craigslist may not have the most beautiful website design, but it certainly has no shortage of useful content for its users.

With that said, the next main focus on getting users these days is advertising.
Here is one recipe for a cluttered inbox in minutes.

1 cup Google Adwords
2 cups Behavioral Targeted Advertising
1/2 cup Facebook advertising
2 tablespoons MySpace Advertising
and 3 cups Water (can substitute w/Milk)
Mix into Google Alerts
Leave out for 5-10 minuets.

Now sit back and watch your creation grow to the max capacity of your inbox.

To be fair, advertising is a great way to grab your customers. This I will not deny. However, Navigation deserves more attention than it gets. It may not be as easy as simply increasing your Adwords spend from $80 to $120, but the impact could be more profound. A mainstream example of navigation at its best can be found in the hypePhone iPhone. Trying to trace the source of all the hype for the iPhone is tough, so I won’t even attempt to do it, but the navigation is what really sets it apart from the competition. It was certainly not the advertising or the 2 megapixel camera.

The same can be said for a good website. Getting information to your users easily and quickly is every bit as important as advertising. In The Web Developer’s Journal navigation is listed as “one of the most critical aspects of Web site design - arguably the most important.” This information may seem shockingly obvious, but when the checkbook comes out often the easiest problems to solve are fixed first, i.e. increase ad spend.

Additionally, what’s better advertising than word of mouth from satisfied customers? I’m not sure what the exact conversion rate is for WOM marketing(I’ll have to check with Baynote’s mad scientist, Scott Brave), but its high, and its free. Check out this post for specific information on how improving the user experience can improve your site’s performance.

OK, Now What?

There are many different ways to address navigation issues. Landing Page Optimization is one, and our recommendation services is another. Navigation is hot and there will be more to come. Stay tuned.

Like Baynote, other companies have found ways to use the wisdom of the crowd to fill various holes in the market. Tomorrow night in Palo Alto, go check out this event sponsored by the MIT Club of Northern California.

Here’s a quick description:

In this talk we will explore, how startups have applied the wisdom of crowds to create unique business opportunities and how they are building monetizable business models. Hear from founders of Baynote, Jigsaw, 8020 Publishing and Satisfaction, who are using their communities’ wisdom or knowhow to drive their companies’ business models.

Find more details on the event here.

For the last two weeks I couldn’t help but notice my inbox being bombarded with reports that behavioral targeting is better than contextual targeting from the blogosphere. Despite my skepticism of the study’s results, I took a closer look. After reading a few different editorials covering this recent Jupiter Research Study(spear-headed by behavioral targeting firm, Revenue Science), I had only one question. Why? Why must Behavioral and Contextual targeting duke it out for the Marketing Methodology Heavyweight Championship? Because of man’s killer gene. Check out this great clip from internet rock star Guy Kawasaki explaining the gene inside men (according to Guy, women don’t have this nasty little gene) responsible for our overly aggressive nature.

Lets step back and imagine a world where Behavioral Targeting services and Contextual Targeting services lay down their arsenals and rejoice in consumer targeting brotherhood. That day is here. Check out Jack Jia’s interview over at Behavioral Insider where he discusses the power of combining behavioral and contextual targeting techniques to bring balance to the force. After all, two heads are better than one.

I’ve just returned from the Shop.org Annual Summit in

Las Vegas. Despite it being in Vegas and having mild distractions lurking around every corner, I managed to see a good deal of the conference content and not miss any of the sessions I was supposed to lead or participate in.

Many continue to ask whether eCommerce growth has peaked. With countless consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, one has to ask these kinds of questions. Well, the data suggests it has not peaked. According to Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru, ecommerce will continue to grow at a rate of 25% annually for the next many years. The reason? Online retailers not tackling the basics.

As the holiday season approaches, and since it’s football season (thankfully), it’s only appropriate that we talk a bit about blocking and tackling fundamentals. Forrester and other pay mention to the following:

 

1) Completing the Transaction

Amazingly, some leading eCommerce websites are seeing transaction failures as high as 12-14%. For comparison purposes, the airline industry which is hardly the gold-standard in service sees has delayed/cancelled flight rates of about 6%. There are $ millions left on the virtual table as consumers are driven to alternative channels to make their purchase.

2) User Experience

Snazzy front ends that are engaging and interesting may draw some attention, but don’t forget the basics of making it easy to browse, search, add to cart, and purchase. ‘Pretty’ is good, but usable is better.

… and finally…

3) Product Recommendations

The only technology that Forrester recommended were recommendation engines.  Recommendation engines help retailers dynamically up-sell / cross-sell / merchandize their products.   With thousands of products and millions of visitors to an online retailer’s website and automated solution to this is a necessity, but measure the impact so you can truly understand the hard-dollar impact it’s making.

So make sure to do your homework and invest in the basics of selling, merchandizing, and completing transactions.Also, I wanted to give some credit to Jason Billingsly over at Elastic Path. He presented an eye-opening and incredibly engaging session on leveraging social media for eCommerce. If you have a chance, check out his session at Online Market World in

San Francisco in early October, you won’t be disappointed.

 

As if we don’t have enough profiles, Digg is giving us one more place to build a profile, why? One more profile that can be used to provide targeted advertisements and content.
Posted on Read/Write Web earlier today:

The Age of Profile Targeting

In the age of social networking giants like Facebook and MySpace, profile targeting is on the rise. Here I am using profile targeting as simply another flavor of behavioral marketing. ClickZ has a great definition of Behavioral marketing:

Behavioral marketing targets consumers based on their behavior on Web sites, rather than purely by the content of pages they visit. Behavioral marketers target consumers by serving ads to predefined segments or categories. These are built with data compiled from clickstream data and IP information.

On paper this seems logical given the wealth of user information found in these profiles, but delivering the right content and messages requires more than simply segmenting users into profiles and matching them with related information.

Targeting Behaviors out of Context

Users have profiles that span different segments and these different profiles are rarely, if ever, active all at once. Truly effective targeting must also take a user’s context into account before providing ads,content, or product recommendations. While behavioral targeting may often provide an improvement to marketing initiatives, ignoring a user’s context, as done by most behavioral targeting solutions, will continue to yield less than optimal results.

Nevertheless, these sites that facilitate social interactions amongst web communities do indeed possess a wealth of information, and deserve the hype surrounding the bunch. In Part 2 of this topic, I’ll dive into how this information can be used to more effectively target users.

Long Tail Economics is about diversifying products and services in order to sell less of more. Doing this increases the amount of options to appeal to more customers. However, diversifying your product line and content often creates more opportunities for users to get lost on a website. Users that don’t quickly find the products, services, or content that they are looking for will seldom spend time fishing for the right page. More than likely, your customers will hit the back button and search elsewhere for their intended targets. A high bounce rate ultimately results in missed revenues.

Improving the user experience on your website serves both you and your users.

What does this mean for websites?

eCommerce:

Delivering the best products at the cheapest prices will drive traffic. However, price and product selection are just parts of what creates a sticky eCommerce site. Here the user experience is greatly measured by the ease of finding products and information about products. Difficulty finding this information will result in bounce back. Furthermore, delivering products that compliment and support the user’s selection provides both increased revenues and a more complete product offering.

Marketing/Lead Generation:

50% of website visitors leave after the first click. Companies continue to spend big bucks on driving traffic to their website without giving the same attention to conventions keeping their users from leaving. A website must have dynamic and robust mechanisms in place to effectively determine the intent of visitors. Delivering the right content, downloads, or forms increases conversion rates significantly and decreases the bounce rate.

Support:

Enhancing customer self-service websites reduces customer support cost in addition to providing a complete customer experience. While maintaining a substantial amount of content is important, ensuring the timely consumption of relevant content drastically reduces bounce rate by empowering your users.

Come join us Wednesday, June 27 at the Santa Clara Convention Center for the WebGuild Searchnomics 2007 Conference and hear Baynote CEO Jack Jia speak on the Increased Revenue through People-Powered Site Search and Recommendations panel. We’d love to see you there! Register Now.

The Searchnomics Conference is a one-day event aimed at web and internet marketing professionals and dedicated to the search industry. At the conference you will learn about trends and best practices in:

• Search Engine Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Design and Development
• Branding and Promotion
• Web Analytics
• New Innovations and Opportunities

Come be a part of this one-of-a-kind conference and learn from expert speakers in the field of search. Don’t forget to stop by the Increased Revenue through People-Powered Site Search and Recommendations panel featuring industry though-leaders including Baynote CEO, Jack Jia.

Register for Searchnomics here

We had a good laugh recently, thanks to our friends over at ElasticPath who have managed to find some humor in the “crazy, messed-up world of eCommerce” and just launched four original parody videos on YouTube called:

- Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…

- Premature Redirection

- Zero Results Found

- If Only Search Engines Could Understand What We Want

We highly recommend viewing the other three parodies at http://www.getelastic.com/crazy-ecommerce to anyone who has ever been at the mercy of the eCommerce gods.

Congratulations to our CTO Scott Brave, and Baynote Advisor Clifford Nass, whose book Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship won the International Communication Association’s Outstanding Book Award last week. Scott and Cliff go way back to Scott’s pre-Baynote days as a doctoral student at Stanford where Cliff was his advisor and a professor in the Communication Department as well as the Director of Stanford’s Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab.

The book itself is an interesting look into voice technology and how people react to and interact with this type of interface. I may not be as eloquent as Cliff and Scott in describing the book but rest assured that they address some pretty interesting topics like how people respond to a male versus female voice in e-commerce, if “happy-sounding” car voices encourage safer driving and when it may or may not be preferable to use synthetic-sounding versus human-sounding voices.

Scott is also putting a lot of the sociological and psychological research used in this book into Baynote’s products which really goes to show you just how passionate (borderline obsessive?) our staff is about community and computer interaction on the web.

This is an interesting read and practical for designers and marketers looking to improve their interfaces and we’re glad that the ICA has honored it with such a prestigious award. Congratulations Scott and Cliff!

Buy Wired for Speech now at Amazon.