If you’re planning on making some movement toward delivering targeted content, and by current estimates of interest in the topic I’d imagine sooner or later you would, you’ll eventually have to make some motion to measure the actions and the return on costs. In the past year, CableOrganizer.com installed a collaborative project to increase our ability to prepare and deliver targeted content based on rules and dispositions for arriving traffic. We used SiteBrand as our solution and measured the results both in their tool and using our Omniture SiteCatalyst interface.

This article should provide insights into the following assertions:

• Targeted Content was successful at minimal application based not solely on statistical regression but in measurement on a per click basis.
• Common and steady revenue returned on investment remains consistently above 500-700%. (Based on our costs by the SiteBrand implementation)
• Time and effort to create and deliver targeted content is worth the resource investment, at first, second and final pass when based on good analysis
• Omniture, though not yet partnered with SiteBrand, can efficiently and effectively measure this solution without extra costs or set up fees.

Targeted Content delivery is, although dynamic and requiring moderate to advanced analysis, not very difficult to implement. The process is relatively simple. You find areas on your landing pages which you would find highly visible and actionable and create alternative code which can be applied. Alright, maybe not quite that simple, but conceptually conceivable.

To determine what needs to be placed in that area, do some analysis. Take a good look at what is bringing people into the landing pages which you’re having problems with. In SiteCatalyst you can harvest a world of data at the page level. The same is true of Google Analytics. Find out why your users are landing on that page and create for them a page which they can relate to and act on based on their arriving disposition. In May 2007 at the eMetrics Summit, a gentleman named Christopher from Microsoft gave an incredible diagram of how to achieve this using dedicated servers. For most of us, this is cost prohibitive. For the rest of us, we can easily break down our 8-10 most important means to arrive at a page and concentrate on that.

Getting in the groove is half the obstacle to making a great, thoughtful, reactive landing page. Don’t sit and wonder for months trying to break into delivery. Sit down, hammer out a bunch of alternative code and images, and get the stuff out there. You will truly be surprised at the value of the pressed effort upon measuring. There is always room to refine and rework problem areas when you get moving. You’re mantra here should be something akin to: “Jimi Hendrix wasn’t born with a guitar and a bandana” or “Michael Jordan was cut from his High School Basketball Team”.

Measure your work; and don’t make one source your text on philosophy. Its a funny thing, but SiteCatalyst was not really set up to measure applications like SiteBrand out of the box. As a result of our content being served offsite, or at least the ‘object’ being served in and out by SiteBrand, we’re able to count these creative ‘Zones’ as campaigns. No eVar necessary. Caution: think about your campaign architecture for this before you input all your tracking codes. I would strongly urge you to consider numbering zones, naming creatives and delegating versions, ownership, and any partner agencies. The more complete and uniform these are when you set them up, the better off you are later in follow-up analysis. The following diagram should show how our zones behave and what type of value we’ve seen returned from our foray in to measured targeted content:

As you can see, there is a fairly solid level of performance in some zones over others. It is interesting to note, that, while the Zone 3 banner shoved into the corner here above is in what most consider a ‘Cold’ area of the site, its since had tremendous success. This feeds interesting insights back into the process. Suddenly, we’ve found ways to make areas of our site previously invisible to the user seem very relevant. Click rates and participation from this zone currently have participatory value in more orders than any two. I guess that means a possible cruise is a powerful ‘click-motivator’.

The big picture is that targeted content is affordable. It can be done with relatively little resource consumption. It can be tested. It can be measured (at least with SiteCatalyst). It can drive facets of the analytics process. It can raise conversion. You have that much information. I would be interested to hear anyone’s accounts of similar experiences.

For more information on any of what is used or discussed above, please feel free to contact me by comment or email. You can contact SiteBrand here. The publication from a Case Study with CableOrganizer.com is available on their site.