For example, a visitor comes to your website and views a page or multiples pages and then leaves. That same visitor goes to other websites after your website and your advertising is shown to them on those websites. Now to be completely clear, your retargeting ads won’t show on every website that visitor goes to after yours; it has to be a web site that is part of same advertising network as the retargeting platform you are working with. Usually, the ad network will have you place some pixels or tracking codes on your website so when a visitor comes to your website information will be stored in a cookie in their browser so that when they leave and go to another website in their network it knows to show them your advertising.

 

According to an article on InternetRetailer.com in May 2009 24% of online marketers were using some form of behavioral retargeting. And when viewing from the consumer side it makes perfect sense – you visit a site that offers something you have some level of interest on, but not yet ready to pull the trigger and purchase or subscribe. You leave and suddenly start seeing over and over again advertisements that feature that company, product, or website almost everywhere you go. Suddenly you can’t get it out of your head, you have to go back and look again, and you start justifying the purchase that it makes sense. It seems so right in your mind. Not everyone will feel this way, but a small percentage will, and had you not retargeted them, you would have lost them to elsewhere.

Once a visitor is at your site and does not covert, behavioral retargeting provides those additional interactions with your product or brand, building that level of trust and interest, making it more likely they will convert upon drawing them back.

TIP:

You need a decent amount of traffic in order for retargeting to be cost effective so that more visitors pick up your behavioral retargeting cookie. This enables more opportunities for visitors to see your ads on the ad network. Of course, you want this traffic to be relevant or they won’t convert no matter what.   A good initial offering is to offer a free report or downloadable product (relevant to your site and target audience) to entice visitors to your website, then they will pick up the cookie and see your ads as they continue onwards as they are retargeted.

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Let’s look at an example of marketing strategy vs. tactics fall in place from the top down:

Marketing Goal (measurable objective):

• Double my consulting revenue by December 31^st.

Marketing Strategy (idea):

• Increase brand exposure

Tactics (actions):

• Submit my prewritten guest article on widget making to Mr. Jones’s blog
• Increase my max CPC bid to $0.90 in Google Adwords for the phrase “josh baker”
• Post video from conference at Youtube

How about a non-marketing analogy to make it even easier?

Goal (measurable objective):

• Buy new black shoes for tonight’s dinner

Strategy (idea):

• Buy shoes at shoe store at 361 Main Street

Tactics (actions):

• Get into car
• Turn car on
• Turn left out of driveway
• Drive straight for 2 miles
• Pull into parking spot in front of store
• Go into store
• Ask salesperson for brand XYZ in size 10, black
• Etc.

Your tactics are the individual actions that you take to make your strategy come to life. Your strategy is the idea that will help you reach your goal.

That is marketing strategy vs. tactics made easy!

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Some common situations for when you want to implement a 301 redirect are:

• You want to move your entire web site to a new domain for example if you want to change the domain name of your website or you are merging 2 websites into 1 website location.
• You changed the URL of an existing web page to a new URL, or updated the URL of an older web page where the old URL may still exist in user bookmarks, incoming links from other websites, or indexed in the search engines.

How to create a 301 redirect:

Creating a 301 redirect within a .htaccess file is the simplest way to set up a 301 redirect.

If your website doesn’t have an .htaccess file, you can create one using notepad or a text edior. When you are done entering the below 301 redirect information, save it as .htaccess and make sure that you place the period before the word htaccess and remove any other file extension such as .txt. You can remove the file extension after uploading the file, but the .htaccess file won’t work if there is an additional file extension at the end.

To 301 redirect a static web page, enter into your text file:

redirect 301 /olddirectory/oldfile.html http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html

• Replace /olddirectory/oldfile.html with the location of your old web page that you want to redirect
• Replace http://www.domainame.com/directory/file.html with the location of the new webpage.
• Be sure not to add http://www to the first part of the 301
• Save the file and upload the .htaccess with your 301 redirect into the root of your domain.
• If you already have information in your existing .htaccess file, just edit the existing file and add the 301 redirect information above in a new line.

To redirect an entire site to a new location, use the 301 redirect code below:

redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/

• Replace www.newdomain.com with the URL of the new domain or location you want to redirect your entire website to.

Additional 301 Redirect References:

• Google FAQ on 301 Redirects
  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
• Matt Cutts on 301 redirects video (Does anchor text carry over through 301 redirects)
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LR8H8pn1M

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But when the numbers were looked at by individual department, it was actually shown that there was a small but statistically significant bias that favored the women in actually having a higher chance at being admitted.

How can this be? Simple, it’s called Simpson’s Paradox. Simpson’s Paradox is when the trends derived from the data from individual subgroups are reversed when the groups are combined.

Let’s take a look at the above example with numbers (as taken from the Simpson’s Paradox entry in Wikipedia):

The subgroups combined, showing men more likely to be admitted:

The subgroups alone, showing women with the slight statistical advantage in being admitted:

Interesting isn’t it?

Gordon Linoff from the Data Miners Blog states in his Simpson’s Paradox and Marketing post:

“I could imagine finding marketing results where Simpson’s Paradox has surfaced, because the original groups were not well chosen. Simpson’s Paradox arises because the sizes of the test groups are not proportional to their sizes in the overall population.”

As marketers, we have to watch out for Simpson’s Paradox when making casual inferences from the data we have which is then used to roll out the winners from marketing tests as well as in the structuring and designing of the tests themselves (i.e. making sure the groups being tested are as identical as possible). I see this often, especially within email marketing A/B tests (although it’s present in many other marketing channels when split testing such items as landing pages or subject lines for instance) when lists are pulled to do tests on and then the results are interpreted.

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But what really got my attention in his post was his ability to clearly articulate and bravely state his thoughts on why he doesn’t recommend ROI as a lead generation metric (including his great Alex Rodriguez analogy).

“The marketing reps should be judged by whether they did their job, which in this case is creating pipeline. The sales team’s job is to close that business. Once marketing creates an opportunity, sales must execute in order to create revenue. The net-net: if marketers creates the pipeline, they have done their job and should be judged accordingly.”

In the many conversations I’ve had with other marketers who focus their efforts either full-time or primarily on lead generation, the vast majority agree with this same theory either in whole or in part. Once the lead is sales ready or even when the potential lead raises their hand, there are numerous potential areas of disconnect both human and technological that may cause the lead to either fail to convert, to be considered a “good qualified lead”, or even to be not contacted at all – failures that aren’t the marketers fault but in which they are still judged by the end results.

For example,

Is it the initial response time in the lead follow-up process that’s hurting the validity (or disguising the marketers true positive results and efforts) of most companies currently measured lead-generation ROI metric they hold as truth? According to an unrelated but problem-specific article written by Brian Eisenberg over at GrokDotCom on Increasing “Qualified” Leads From Your Website, he discusses the results from a survey conducted by Omniture and InsideSales.com in which they completed lead forms from over 700 companies and reported that web-generated leads decrease effectiveness by over 6 times in the first hour. Yes, you read that right, a decrease of effectiveness of over 6 times in the first hour – yikes!

Disturbingly so, companies only responded back to them 47.3 percent of the time by email, and by phone just 7.5 percent of the time. Do the math and you can see that an amazingly large percentage of the time they weren’t contacted at all when they filled out forms designed for lead generation by marketing teams. Sure, some of their leads could have been scored and not deemed valuable to physically call back, but not even an email back (manual or even triggered) seems completely absurd and a lost opportunity.  As Brian states in his article,

“Marketers have potential customers who indicated some level of qualification to buy from your company and sales people who practically refuse to respond”

This is just one of the areas that hurt marketers when companies want to calculate the ROI of a lead generation campaign (were the leads bad, or the process broken?), but there are many more. Factor this into that lead generation ROI is what lead generation marketers are responsible for proving their own worth with and this can lead to potential disaster, both in responsibility to their programs (too many times and it could result in the potential loss of their job) and in calculating if certain channels or programs are truly profitable or not in order to continue on with them. I’m not in 100% agreement that it’s entirely the sales people’s fault, but more a fault in this commonplace process that’s proven its absurdness in the Omniture and InsideSales.com study.

Of course this is a touchy and even a controversial subject, but companies really need to now more than ever deeply consider how they truly feel about how much weight they place on the ROI of the lead generation metric they hold their marketers accountable for. Not just for the marketers sake, but for revenues sake. Furthermore, could that metric actually be masking the true happenings of what’s going wrong with the lead pipeline and follow-up process? Does this metric expose the true ability to really measure what needs to be fixed and optimized or does it simply cover it up?

As Craig Rosenberg of Funnelholic states, what marketers should be measured against is CPO – Cost per Opportunity,Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion, and Total Pipeline Created. To me this is a step in the right direction in not only improving how marketers and their performance are graded, but also steps to developing a more valid system of uncovering where leaks in the process are happening. The bottom line is that we all want to make more money but could our current process and performance grading mistakes be leaving potentially easy or easier money on the table than is realized.

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