Great email marketing relies on sending relevant content to your contacts. Your data is crucial to this and the richer it is, and the more intelligently you can use it, the more effective your marketing is.
Suppose you're an ecommerce site looking to rescue your abandoned carts or make the most of insight into viewed product pages. Then Web behavior tracking lets you target these contacts with relevant content.
Sending the right contacts the appropriate product recommendations or offers dramatically increases the likelihood that they'll be back to complete a purchase. It goes a long way in improving your customer service; making your business look better in your contacts' eyes while increasing customer loyalty.
It's not just ecommerce
Of course, this same logic above doesn't just apply specifically to an ecommerce business' needs and the selling of a physical product. It can also apply to targeting contacts who haven't followed through when viewing a page containing a signup, subscription, or enquiry form. Another example could be when a contact has browsed a page containing downloadable material, but yet they haven't committed to the download.
Learn more
Before you start
Things you need to know:
You must have Web behavior tracking installed.
If you're new to segmentation, check out the Segmentation overview.
1. Create a Web behavior tracking segment
Go to Audience > Segments and select NEW SEGMENT.
Give your segment a name, expand the Segment location drop-down menu to select a folder to store your segment, and then select CONTINUE.
Drag an Insight data block from the right-hand side panel into the Include or Exclude dropzone.
If you only have a small number of Insight data collections in your account, then instead of a single Insight data block, you see an individual block for each collection. If this is the case, drag a WebInsights block into your segment and select [click to select WebInsights data], then skip to Create your segment rules.
Select [click to select Insight data] in the editing area to open the Insight data editing window. Expand the drop-down menu at the top of the window and select WebInsights.
If you’re familiar with using segmentation already, this allows you to construct your segment rules in the usual way, with a few differences specific to Insight data.
2. Create your segment rules
There are two parts of a Web behavior tracking rule – a contact filter and a transactional filter.
The contact filter selects the contacts that meet the conditions of your rule. A transactional filter then adds further criteria to the browsing activities of contacts for inclusion within the count or sum as specified within the initial contact filter condition of your rule.
The contact filter firstly requires you to choose whether your rule is a Number of statement, a Total of statement or an Average of statement:
Switching between the radio buttons changes the statement below it accordingly.
Information
For example, if you have the values 1, 3, and 6 in three records, then:
The number of (Number of) them is 3 because you have three values; think of it as how many.
The total of (Total of) the values is the sum of all values and is 10 because, for this example, 1+3+6=10; think of it as combined value. Total of takes all records for one field and adds up the values; it doesn't add up values across multiple fields for the same record.
The average of (Average of) the values is the average of all values and is 3.33... because, for this example, the average of 1, 3, and 6 (1+3+6)÷3=3.33....
The following is a very simple example of creating a Web behavior tracking segment based on the data of customers who have visited a certain area of your website.
Let’s say you want to discover who has browsed your autumn offers product pages, so you can target them with not only the products they viewed but also related product recommendations they might be interested in.
To do this:
Set your contact filter as The number of transactions must be greater than or equal to 1.
The full choice of comparison operators areis equal to
is not equal to
is more than
is less than
is greater than or equal to
is less than or equal to
starts with
is between
Expand the Select data field drop-down menu and select page_url, then expand the next drop-down menu and select starts with. In the text field, enter the beginning of the URL path for the pages you want to identify.
You can construct more complex queries by adding more transaction filters to your segment rule, up to an additional seven. For example, you could add an additional filter of Duration being equal to or greater than one minute, which would ensure you only include contacts who have genuinely had a good look at this page and not just clicked through and then away within seconds.
You can delete a transaction filters by selecting the cross icon next to the filter on the far right.
Select OK to close the Web behavior tracking data editing window and view your rule.
Select SAVE to generate a count for your segment.
Select VIEW to see the contacts who meet the rules of your segment.
A flexible and powerful tool
The Web behavior tracking segmentation editing tool gives you plenty of flexibility to make more complex, powerful rules to greatly increase the accuracy of your campaign targeting. The example above uses a Number of rule, but you can also select Total of or Average of for a different type of rule.
When using transaction filters, the comparison operators change depending on the Web behavior tracking data field selected, and so does the value input box, depending on the data value type of the data field.
For example, if you select a Web behavior tracking data field of VisitTime, which has a value type of date, then the comparison operators change to accommodate this. This provides you with all sorts of possibilities to filter behaviour according to a date.
Exclude and include
Of course, exclusions can be added to your Web behavior tracking segment's rules, meaning you could exclude a certain product page or pages for autumn offers whilst including others. This would be useful if you were looking to increase sales for your lower selling products, as you could target those contacts who only specifically viewed such lower selling product pages, whilst excluding contacts who have viewed the better selling product pages.
Combine with OrderInsight
If you’re an ecommerce business and also have OrderInsight data, you can introduce this extra data into your segment too, making even more powerful segments that combine contacts' browsing behaviour with their purchasing history.
Learn more in the Non-developer’s guide to Insight data.