Cost per click, cost per acquisition, pay per click, hits, time spent, unique users, unique visitors… the list goes on and on. With a bevy of systems and channels for marketing, how does a marketer make sense of it all?

Well, fuggedabout metrics and start building your behavioral targeting systems – ASAP!

Let me explain. I don’t care about impression counts or numbers of unique users – those metrics are meaningless when you’re talking to your lines of business. There is only one metric that counts, and that is SALES. At the end of the day, if you don’t make the cash register ring, you won’t be worried about impression counts.

OK, great you say, but how do you do that?

You have to start profiling behavior on your site in a way that you can collect data from organic traffic coming in, as well as any referral traffic arriving via Google and other sources. With a simple cookie, you can ID returning visitors. You also can add to their online profile if they engage in activities on your site such as downloading a white paper, listening to a podcast, reading a blog post.

With this type of information, paired with their profile, you can continue to communicate with them via email about interests they are expressing on your site.

I feel this is critical for marketers to be working on. The number of channels is exploding before our eyes – YouTube, blogs, wikis, etc. How are you going to track all that??

You have to have a baseline behavioral tracking system in place. Otherwise, you won’t get to second base by adding tracking from sister sites like blogs or wikis, which you launched for some marketing campaign but are not part of your domain.

Behavioral targeting is the only way to get real data about what a client, prospect, account or group of like buyers might want. It’s how you can help move the targeting needle for the sales team by continuing to nurture them until they reach the elusive moment of need for your product or service.