MaxBLOG

In the youthful days of the internet, marketers were preoccupied with building online real-estate. Getting the right domain, acquiring traffic and ranking high in search engines were the key priorities. The rise in online advertising spend is well documented demonstration of this phase; we’ve all seen the graphs with their exponential upward curves.

Once marketers got good at acquisition, the brightest ones began to reach the limit of the amount of high quality traffic they could bring to a site in a cost-effective manner. At this point, the focus shifted to analysing what these visitors were doing once they arrived at the site. Marketers wrestled the controls of web analytics tools away from the IT department and began to analyse funnels and abandon rates.

Now we reach the present, our top of the class online marketer has taken steps to resolve the big issues that analytics highlighted and is looking for the next way to keep ahead of his (or her) competition.

In the UK and European market, a growing number of forward-thinking companies are harnessing content intelligence to drive the next stage in on-site conversion uplift. Techniques such as multivariate testing, visitor segmentation and behavioural targeting allow marketers to place the right content, creative and offers in front of the right visitors at the right time.

Multivariate testing combines well worn direct marketing techniques with some intelligent mathematics and automated methods of changing site content on the fly. What’s more, with self learning techniques, Maxymiser technology can learn what content drives uplift and display it to more future visitors.

Visitor segmentation and behavioural targeting represent the upper echelons of content intelligence. By discovering what content works well for visitors segmented by various criteria, a site can take account of the fact that not everyone is turned on by the same things.

Behavioural targeting takes this a stage further and discovers the content that works best on a highly granular visitor by visitor basis. We can even pull in data from client CRM databases in order to get demographic profiling by postal/zip code as well as looking at past interaction history.

Peter sets out his full vision of Content Intelligence in our whitepaper on the subject, you can download that here – Introducing Automated Content Intelligence.