Behavioural Targetting and Visitor Segmentation with BTBuckets0
Matt Hopkins posted in Web Analytics, Visitor Segmentation on November 15th, 2008
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In October a new website was launched called BtBuckets, however it was only recently that the site was brought to my attention. BtBuckets offers a free service for you segement your website visitors based on their online actions and place them into buckets. You can set the buckets to only begin filling oncew the user has performed a set of actions a number of times or only once and they can stay in that bucket for as you as you want. Each visitor can be placed in as many buckets as you have predefined with an unlimited number of visitors per bucket.
The service works by using Javascript to tag every page on your site within the page HEAD HTML element so that each user action is recorded to the BtBuckets site. Within the BtBuckets user interface you can define sets of rules by which the buckets will be filled with visitors. For example if a user comes from google.com and fills out the last page of your sales process they can be placed into a “converted” bucket, or if they reach the second stage of your conversion process but have yet to reach the final stage then they can be placed into the “semi-converted” bucket. Perhaps even you have various services for different types of people on your site, like a section for consumers and a section for business users, you could define a bucket for each type of user depending on which pages they view.
BtBuckets is somewhat limited, and that is to be excpeted given that it is a brand new service and free. The limitation comes in the fact that you can only define your bucket rules based on 2 types of criteria, where the user came from (referrer) and which page the user is currently on. You cannot at the moment track details such as Javascript events which would be useful for tracking form level events, no temporal based metrics cannot be used so you can’t segment the users by nocturnal or daylight users, or any other useful metric such as geography.
Given its limitations, I still think BtBuckets could be extremely useful for small website owners, however it is in no way a replacement for services such as TouchClarity which has been aquired by Omniture.
So How can BtBuckets be Helpful Given it’s Limits?
The fun and very exciting part of BtBuckets for me is not so much the visitor segmentation which is available in most good web analytics packages but its the behavioural targetting feature. This is because it is a well known fact that lots of web analtyics installations get setup and left to collect loads of data and most often the data collected does not get used to make meaningful decisions or used to put changes into action. This is where behavioural targetting is an amazing and simple concept. All you have to do is define some rules to place your visitors into buckets based on where they came from and what pages they visit on your site, then you can define which website content each of those buckets can see on your website.
To give you 2 examples of how this would work we’ll look at an e-commerce site and an informational site. The e-commerce site might sell electronics and like all e-commerce stores will have a shopping cart process. If the end of the shopping cart process presented the user with a page that contained all of the products purchased as variables in the page query sting or page name then you could set a bucket rule to be triggered if someone purchased a games console like a Wii or PS3, we’ll call that bucket the “gamers”. Within the pages on the website we could them embed a piece of Javascript that would check to see if the visitor was in the “gamers” bucket and if so would show them other products that may be of interest to gamers such as large flat screen TVs or a link to their video games section. This way you would be presenting the visitor with more relevant content based on their previous actions and as Amazon has proven countless times, this works and increases conversions and enlarges the average shopping basket size.
The second example is an informational site, lets say its a sporting news site with a number of sections for each type of sport, so a section for football, fishing, horse racing, tennis and golf. Let’s assume that the conversion point would be to either signup to the newsletter and/or click on an advert. With modern context based advertising such as Google Adsense we can sometimes leave the advertising targetting to the advert providers (but BtBuckets blog shows how you can mix BtBuckets with Google Ad Manager). However in the case of the newsletter signups, we could set a rule that if a user views more than 2 pages about golf within a 2 week period we can present them with an option to signup for a newsletter all about golf, otherwise they get the general newsletter feature shown. We could do that for each type of sport presented. Or maybe we could put the visitor into many buckets, one for each type of content they viewed then present them with a newsletter signup that highlighted the sections they had previously viewed. I.e.
Signup to our newsletter on fishing and golf to get the latest up to date news and information.
These are only 2 very simple examples, I can think of at least 2 advanced uses whereby the bucket was called using invisible iframe HTML elements so that you can pass any information to the BtBuckets system, or maybe break down the Javascript code within the page tag to call the Javascript event directly based on other Javascript events such as form fields, however I would only suggest that for the very technically abled people.
All in all, I think this is a great addition to any web analytics implementation where you are not at a stage to purchase advanced behavioural targetting software but would like many of the advantages for free. If you have integrated BtBuckets into your site yet and have some nice examples to share please comment below.
