Personalize Your Digital Marketing Using Behavior-based segments

What is Behavior-Based Targeting?

Behavior-based targeting uses data from online shoppers to strengthen personalized advertisements. When a shopper visits your website, a unique identifier is created in the form of a cookie or other identifying measures. Any activity performed by the shopper is tied to the unique identifier. This leads to segments that can be created based on these behaviors Examples of these behaviors  include clicks, page views, and conversions. 

If a website visitor completes an action that meets a segment’s requirements, they will be placed into that segment. Examples would include viewing the finance page or viewing a used vehicle page. If a visitor views both of these pages, they will be placed into two different segments. These visitors can be placed in both of these segments, or in each depending on the dealership’s business objectives. Using segments enables behavior-based targeting for digital marketing and is fundamental to creating personalized ads.

The Importance of Behavior-Based Targeting

Behavior-based targeting needs to be a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy. Using it increases digital marketing efficiency and conversions while spending less ad dollars. With this, personalized advertisements with audience segmentation can significantly increase your click-through rates. 

Over 78% of consumers say that personally relevant content increases their purchase intent (Marketing Insider Group). Using behavior-based targeting increases the engagement on the website due to directing shoppers to a relevant landing page. If your dealership is providing ads and recommendations in accordance with what they’re interested in, they will find what they’re looking for.

How to do Behavior-Based Targeting

Behavior-based targeting requires the creation of segments using the appropriate advertising platform. To begin behavior-based targeting, follow these steps:

Step 1 - Decide on a business goal: What is your business objective?  Do you want to sell more used cars? Do you want more trade-in vehicles? 

Step 2 - Define shopper behaviors on the website that match business objectives: Shoppers who viewed used VDPs and SRPs, contact us page, finance page, etc. 

Step 3 - Create segments based on those definitions. You can create these segments with your ad vendor or through the ad platform of your choice.

Step 4: Set up segments for each of your advertising channels (i.e. Facebook and Google). 

Step 5: When a website visitor meets the requirement for the goal, it synchronizes data to your dealership’s Facebook and Google Ads site trackers to segment your shoppers into specific buckets. This allows coordinated advertising campaigns across multiple advertising platforms.

PRO TIP: Make sure you select the landing page that is relevant to the ads you are showing to a seamless personalized experience.

Personalized messages have proven results

Serving personalized messages on your dealership’s display advertisements can yield an increase from 4.3% to 10.1% for intent rate and conversion rates from 0% to 0.5%. Open rates for regular emails hover around 17% for regular emails, but personalized emails generate open rates of up to 66%. Similarly, click-through rates of regular email blasts tend to average between 1-2%, increased to 2.17. Personalized retargeting emails average 17% CTRs.