Geotargeting is starting to generate some buzz. Just today Jack Aaronson, a ClickZ columnist, published a story called Geotargeting Comes of Age in E-commerce. It’s a great story that speaks to the incredible power of personalizing web content based on a visitor’s geo-location. In fact it references a Sitebrand customer, BedBathStore.com, for its leadership in this still fairly uncommon use of technology. To add to the ClickZ story, it’s also interesting to consider how BedBathStore.com goes a step further by pairing day of week strategies into the mix. In talking with Alok Ahuja, the Sitebrand account manager working with BedBathStore.com, he said they are seeing some amazing results that relate to the combination of geotargeting with day of week targeting.
Even though these day of week geo campaigns (floating divs like the screenshot above) are only being shown 4 times per month (since there’s typically 4 weeks in a month), they are proving to outperform other geo-target only type campaigns that run ALL month long. This retailer is especially blown away by the Sunday geo campaigns. Apparently these Sunday geo campaigns are a massive success. Who would have thought?! Obviously it’s a popular day to shop from home.
So geotargeting is one great way to boost conversion, but pairing geotargeting with day of week immediacy and urgency is proving to really ramp things up!
6 Comments
Kevin Stecko at 14:50 on May 30, 2008
Has this been tested versus the same messaging without the geotargeting?
Bloggers Digest - 5/30/08 | Get Elastic at 15:56 on May 30, 2008
[...] Jack Aaronson writes about the virtues of geo-IP targeting (or just geotargeting) over at Clickz, using Sitebrand client BedBathStore.com as an example. Check out Sitebrand’s blog for some color commentary on how the geotargeting campaign is performing. [...]
Alok Ahuja at 8:57 on June 4, 2008
To answer your question Kevin, this campaign/messaging has only been tested in a geo specific segment. The owner of BedBathStore asked me what would be an effective way to target the various states, and after spending several days in there analytical data I came to this conclusion; each state had very different visit times. After taking this into consideration we offered different messages to different states based on what day of the week it was, according to the data found in the analytics.
Kevin Stecko at 10:42 on June 4, 2008
Thanks for the update Alok. I would be interested to see how a banner with everything but the Golden State Shopper graphic would perform.
Alok Ahuja at 8:29 on June 5, 2008
That’s a great theory Kevin, and we actually already did that. Not only did we target California but we did the same with Illinois, New York and Texas. Then we did a generic message for every other US shopper all based on the day of the week. We based our deployment on the analytical data and which day of the week received the highest spike in traffic. The generic US floating div helped BedBathStore increase conversion, clicks and most importantly transactions.
ECOMMERCE - Bloggers Digest - 5/30/08 at 15:53 on June 19, 2008
[...] Jack Aaronson writes about the virtues of geo-IP targeting (or just geotargeting) over at Clickz, using Sitebrand client BedBathStore.com as an example. Check out Sitebrand’s blog for some color commentary on how the geotargeting campaign is performing. [...]