Smargeting: Find Out What Really Makes Your Vistors Click

Imagine knowing exactly where your users' interests lie. The topics they prefer, their favorite stores; the tv shows they like best or the brands that give them a buzz. Such information is marketing gold, allowing you to fine-tune advertising as well as provide content your visitors like best.

But short of asking outright through on-site questionnaires (rarely a good idea because it's far too obvious) surely there's no way to access such detailed information?

In fact, it's easier than you might ever imagine. And because this is a smarter, simpler smargeting technique, the only tools required are plenty of copy and a way to track page stats.

The key to gaining your audience profile lies, quite simply, in a systematic and logical use of links.

Any tightly structured website should already have such architecture in place, but in reality many sites are much more organic and evolve gradually over time. This is particularly the case amongst publishers who start sites as marketing tools then expand them as required.

So let's take a look at how logical linking can supply you with some extraordinary insights.

Imagine, for example, that you're running a sports fansite. It includes info on a wide range of sports, and you've certainly noticed that, according to your stats, some pages are more popular than others.

No surprise there, of course, but since your content tends to be mixed, it's unclear exactly what appeals. What you really need is a much more definitive picture of your visitors' interests.

In this case, we're going to start by creating something the site seriously lacks: a set of links to pages covering individual sports. The links won't be placed inside copy, because users tend to click while they read; instead, we'll present them as a kind of mini nav-bar, after, say, a feature article.

Grouped together like this, our visitors are essentially presented with a choice between activities. Let's say for the moment that these are football, baseball, golf, tennis and swimming (not an exhaustive list, but we'll add extra options at a later stage).

In reality, it's likely that your own site already includes such navigational breakdown into clear sub-categories and if so, that's great. But whether it's in place or you have to create the links specifically, they form the first branch of what we'll call a 'smargeting tree'.

Let's get back to our sports site, where the aim now is to track page impressions for a week or so to find which of the newly created pages receive most attention.

Golf proves extremely popular, which means it's a sport that obviously interests many of our visitors. A good start, and armed with this information, we'll expand our smargeting tree to discover more about just what form this interest takes.

We'll run some front page content - a short feature on golf - and at the end of it provide a further series of links. This time the options will be narrower: golf courses, golf equipment, golfing techniques.

Again, we'll watch those page impressions to see if any kind of favorite emerges. And it does - golf equipment. Which means that in two very simple steps we've discovered that a fair percentage of our readers have an interest in golf, and in particular, golfing accessories.

It really is that easy. And all we're doing is treating successive links as increasingly refined market 'segments' in order to build up a picture of what makes our users tick.

So now we decide to expand the smargeting tree to find out which type of equipment is of particular interest. After a quick search in Google for suitable categories, we come up with golf clubs, golf bags and golf shoes. Will there be any clear winners? We'll have to wait for those page impressions to find out....

If it all sounds very obvious, that's because it is - but simple methods are often the best, as well as frequently overlooked. Be honest: do you consciously utilize your linking and content in this way? You'd be surprised how many have never given it a thought.

Of course, for a more systematic approach you can set up an entire smargeting tree in one go, rather than stages. Plan it out first, just as you would with a standard website, and make sure that the links from content page to content page branch out into increasingly segmented divisions.

With the information gained, you can begin to target your advertising much more efficiently. Make sure you employ other smargeting techniques, too: if, for example, golfing shoes emerge as a high interest item in our final test, a mini-mall of pictured products will probably prove more attractive than a text ad.

Finally, if you're worried about all the extra content the smargeting tree technique involves - don't be. Remember you can find free articles on pretty much any topic, and that your tree content doesn't necessarily need to become a permanent part of your site.

So next time you want to know something like the kind of vacation your visitors prefer; where they're likely to stay and even how they'll be traveling, make sure they start climbing a smargeting tree. Watching the route they take can help you get to the top, too.