Behavioural Profiling

The balance between privacy and personalisation has always been a delicate one. When you visit a web site, you want to see things that are relevant to you. However, the methods used to allow this are often controversial or ineffective. On one side sites can allow users to customise their experience by personalising the home page or choosing types of content. On the other side, behavioural profiling can be used to push relevant content.

Each approach has its benefits and its drawbacks. At the end of the day very few people can actually be bothered to personalise a web site, unless they use it extremely frequently. And if they do personalise the contents, they may miss out on other tangential topics. Behavioural profiling relies on tracking an increasing number of interactions that the user has with the site or sites, and as such is controversial.

Behavioural targeting is in use by a number of Ad networks, where behaviour on content specific web sites, determines the type of adverts that a person will see when they visit content generic web sites. There are numerous technical challenges with this, but privacy tends to be the focus. The idea that website ‘B’ know what I did on website ‘A’ can be a bit off putting for many users, particularly if they don’t receive any benefit.

Over the last 12 months, facebook has been in the press regularly for their deployment of behaviourally targeted ads. There has been a significant end user backlash against the monetisation of the social web site, with many against the idea of targeted adverts. But in June of this year facebook has turned the model on its head by allowing users to vote on the adverts that were displayed (link to story). In my opinion this is the first example of a more general trend in online advertising. The ability to vote on ads instantly changes the simple concept of display advertising to a far more semantic engagement. Even if a visitor votes negatively, their engagement with the advert has significantly increased. This increased engagement requires additional thought and will therefore improve awareness and more importantly retention. As the old adage states “all news is good news”.

In addition, eye tracking studies conducted by behavioural targeting company Tacoda have shown that behavioural targeted adverts result in 17% more engagement when compared to contextual targeting (adverts based on the contents of the page). Further more, it was found that following the first exposure the advantage increased to 54%. This was supported by an experiment conducted on the FT.com website, where they found 193% lift in awareness and 178% lift in recall for behavioural targeted adverts when compared to simple run-of-site adverts.

However, it is vital that the relationship is transparent and built on trust. The customer must remain in control or else the company risks alienating the customer. Behavioural profiling companies, such as Phorm and NebuAd have suffered significantly in the press following concerns over public acceptance. NeuAd’s CEO has recently stepped down, with the company looking at alternative strategies. Phorm has seen a significant drop in its share price, and its trials with BT remain extremely controversial as the behavioural profiling is at the ISP level without any customer control.

The technology now exists to allow highly targeted forms of marketing. Companies can effectively merge their marketing and communication strategies, allowing them to selectively contact people about products they might actually be interested in, rather than forcing marketing to everyone via broadcast techniques.

It is clear that behavioural targeting can be extremely successful if deployed correctly. It can be beneficial to both sides: the consumer is exposed to adverts or products that will likely be of interest to them; and the company improves the return on its marketing investment by targeting people that are more likely to respond.

The key to success lies in trust. The consumer is king and their experience is vital. In the current economic climate retention of valuable customer is important, and in the fickle world of the web experience is everything.