Behaviorl targeting, digital advertising, web analytics, viral marketing, social commerce, etc., whatever term you use: it comes down to the analysis of consumers’ behaviors via the Web, wireless and other consumer channels for the marketer and advertiser of today.  Behavioral analytics is the future of all digital advertising – furthermore the convergence of offline and online data enables advertisers and marketers to monetize consumers’ behaviors – for personalized growth marketing for their clients.

Behavioral analytics can be leveraged by not only digital marketers but also by digital enterprises at their websites and within all their marketing channels.  All digital advertising segments will be driven by behavioral analytics, whether display, search, rich media, DVR, in-game, Web, mobile, etc., in a market projected to exceed $20 billion in a few years.

This site will discuss how digital marketers and advertisers can adopt behavioral analytics techniques – as well as how they can leverage for their clients personalization mechanisms, Web and mobile networks, real-time psychographics, personalized surveys, recommendation engines for targeted marketing and time specific relevance in their messages. 

Behavioral analytics is the underlying process enabling digital advertising and marketing, in the placement of products or services via multiple channels to consumers, in a relevant and personal manner as they interact with websites and enterprises.

Behavioral analytics vendors are scrambling to gather new forms of data to make digital advertising more personal and comprehensive which require capturing, analyzing and acting on consumer actions and reacting with precise counter-actions, which are beneficial to both.

Behavioral analytics is made possible by subscription and partnering with advertising, demographics or recommendation networks, as well as by the use of new real-time streaming analytical software or a combination of both.  Behavioral analytics enables digital marketers and advertisers to position the right product or service in front of the right consumer via targeted messages in multiple formats: Web, email, mobile, etc. 

Behavioral analytics initially existed exclusively on the Web however those same techniques and technologies can today be integrated and leverage by marketers and advertisers to service and sell to their existing and future customers via multiple channels including wireless devices. 

Not all consumer groups clusters along the traditional dimensions of offline demographics such as household income as they align with propensity to purchase the same products or content and follow the same type of spending habits. 

For this reason, static demographic data should not be used as the building blocks of a well-defined customer segmentation system. Demographic data may be used to describe customer segments (profiling), but it is much less effective in distinguishing interests and spending habits than customer behavioral data.  Behavioral data goes beyond knowing that a customer has purchased a certain product. It involves capturing customer events and actions over time and using these stored interactions to determine typical behavior and deviations from that behavior.

At the lowest and most fundamental level behavioral analytics is made possible by embeddable chunks of code in the form or cookies, forms, beacons and widgets which have existed since the start of ecommerce over a decade ago and is also made possible by software agents retrieving, organizing and mining across clouds of data sources – networked via the Web.  Code aside, most importantly behavioral analytics enables enterprises and digital ad gals and guys to calibrate and react with precision to consumer preferences, tendencies, and desires with methods of communication that are instantly gratifying, enticing and entertaining such as rich media. 

New behavioral analytics techniques and technologies are evolving from the decade old cookie-reliant methods for getting a 360 view of consumer behavior.  Some new behavioral analytics vendors focus on purchase activity as a more direct and relevant indicator of interests, or the mix with clickstream behavior with real-time demographic and psychographic data to find likely consumer targets.