expertSEM

Behavioral targeting is the topic du jour in search, with big names like Google and MSN betting a substantial amount of potential revenue on making it work. But we search marketers have been behaviorally targeting customers for years in our own creative ways.

My agency manages IMSafer, a firm dedicated to giving parents free instant message monitoring tools to protect kids from online predators. Because their product is so specific, there are limited keywords that tie directly to what they do, and a limited amount of performance we can get from marketing on these keywords alone.

To grow the campaign and achieve a higher ROAS, we delved into the realm of psychology to behaviorally target the parents most likely to use IMSafer. We knew that these parents would probably do other things online that were related to the topic of child predators, such as looking at databases of sex offenders in their areas or reading news articles about notorious child predators.

Using this knowledge of our prospective user base, we created keyword lists comprised of notorious people and associations connected to child predators: infamous criminals “Mary K. Letourneau” and “Mark Foley”; well-known victims “Polly Klaas” and “Elizabeth Smart”; organizations and laws, such as “Klaas Foundation” and “Amber Alert”; television shows, like “To Catch A Predator”; and for good measure, every state and local sex offender registry we could find. We ran these terms with customized ad copy for each group. In the text we explain why the IMSafer service is an important online safety tool for parents to use.

Our results speak for themselves; we not only increased ROAS for this campaign, but also placed a tool in the hands of more parents that helps protect their children from the dangers of the Internet.

Taking this approach with your own campaigns will give you more options for keywords and ROAS if orchestrated correctly. So, don’t wait for Google and MSN to implement behavioral targeting, go ahead and do it yourself.