Bizo enhances Analyze and Targetable Segments

We're excited to announce that we just released the latest upgrades to our targetable B2B audience segments and Bizo Analyze product. These upgrades deliver two powerful capabilities to marketers using the Bizo products:

1. Exporting: Marketers and publishers that use Bizo Analyze can now export any query from their dashboard to a .CSV file for easy use within Microsoft Excel or other data management software. This makes it even easier to work with the B2B website traffic data that Bizo Analyze delivers to marketers and publishers.

2. New Segments: Bizo has released over 150 new Industry and Job Function segments. These new segments allow our targeting and analytics to be much more focused. For example, before we were able to target simply Medical/Health professionals, but with the new segments, Bizo marketers can now target and report on detailed segments within the Medical/Health segment such as Cardiologists or Psychiatrists.

As always, Bizo Analyze remains a free product for marketers to use to measure their web traffic. Click here to learn more and sign up to measure the B2B traffic on your own website today!

Audience Segmentation in Action

Hoover’s is one of the leading sources of proprietary business information with a database of information on more than 30 million corporations and organizations, and more than 35 million people. Their trade is the intelligence that business people need to get their jobs done.

Earlier this year, Hoover’s marketers went through the process of drilling down to answer just what kind of businessperson is their best target customer. It’s an exercise that marketing departments go through all the time, but when Hoover’s took the answer to the Bizo ad-targeting platform they were able to put into action.

“What was intriguing to us was the ability to target people in their network based on their job title, the size of their company, what level they are at the company.” said Rocky Brown, marketing manager at Hoover’s. “We were able to take the segmenting work we had done — which identified sales roles in micro to small businesses, and marketing roles in pace-setter mid-sized businesses as our key customers — and translate that to targeted advertising.”

Because of the research that Hoover’s had done up front about these audience segments, the creative wasn’t challenging to execute. Because the ads would be targeted to a particular subset of the business audience, the ads could be very specific in their messaging.

Working with Bizo, Hoover’s was able to target ads to exactly the audience that their own research had shown would be the most receptive to their messages. It was also an audience they hadn’t been able to target effectively in the past. They started targeting their ads in September 2009 and the results have been significant.

Hoover’s, which had been advertising on ad networks that had advertised themselves as reaching business audiences, saw clickthroughs on its advertisements improve at a rate of 3x higher than the last campaign.

Rocky was pleased to see the results come in so strong. “I can’t say it was surprising, but we were pleased to actually see it happened.” Because Hoover’s sales doesn’t usually stretch past a month at the most, Hoover’s was able to quickly calculate ROI on its online advertising spend. It came in at 181% in September and 278% in October.

“What we saw was using a reduced spend — and I’m not ever advocating for a reduction in marketing expenses —we were maintaining the same amount of revenue,” said Rocky. “The ROI was fantastic.”

Bizo – Supercharging B2B landing pages – BizAudience API available in beta today

Today, B2B marketing is largely a process of driving visitors to a website, and often to specific landing pages within that website. Whether a marketer is using email, search, webinars, display ads, or a combination of all of the above, the ultimate goal is to bring a visitor to their website to purchase a product or fill out a form for more information. A ton of work and budget goes into creating the campaigns that convince users to come to a landing page, not to mention the fact that roughly 50% of a marketer’s budget is spent on the website (according to Forrester) – the vehicle designed to convert the visitor to a purchase or a lead.

However, the success rate of turning a visitor into a lead is actually quite small – ranging from 0.5% to 20% of visitors. This small number of leads ultimately costs marketers billions of dollars. For example, let’s say a marketer spends $2.00 per click to drive visitors to their website from Google. If they are able to convert 5% of those visitors to leads, they are getting 5 leads for every 100 visitors or $200 they spend. That means they’re spending $40.00 for every lead. If they were able to improve the conversion rate of the landing page by just another 2%, the cost per lead would drop by roughly $12. This is a 40% improvement in the ROI of the marketing campaign. Multiply this across every marketer in the world, and the opportunity becomes clear.

One marketer that has cracked this nut is Amazon.com. The company has received a lot of well-deserved attention for its ability to personalize each site visitor’s experience. Every Amazon.com visitor has a different experience based on who they are and the products they’ve purchased in the past. Amazon.com predicts what a user might be interested in, which has driven the company to industry leading success and growth – all while delivering a phenomenal experience for the visitor.

Enter Bizo. The company was created to help B2B marketers target online advertising to business audiences. Today, Bizo is launching a new service that allows marketers to use this same targeting to significantly improve the conversion rates of their landing pages, creating an experience much like users get at Amazon.com. The service is called the BizAudience API, and simply, it tells a marketer exactly who is visiting their site – THE MOMENT THEY ARRIVE.

This service allows a marketer to create landing pages and websites that are personalized to each visitor coming to the site. For example, if a visitor from the healthcare industry comes to a landing page, the marketer can now serve their healthcare-focused case study. If a CFO comes to the site, a marketer can serve finance-related content or messaging that will be relevant to the CFO. Similarly, small business owners see SMB content when they arrive on a landing page.

Bizo is now providing the capability for any website owner to easily personalize the experience for business visitors, and ultimately convert more visitors for a higher ROI on all marketing activities. We’ve released the API in a limited beta starting today. If you are interested in an API key for the beta period, please reach out and email us at API-support@bizo.com and we’ll put you on the list!

The Next Generation of Truly Transparent Ads

If you’ve been following this blog or if you’ve spent any time on our Web site, you know that Bizo has a deep commitment to transparency. We built this company around the idea that it was possible to target advertising without compromising anyone’s privacy. (Read more about that here and here.)

But lately we’ve been thinking about what it might look like if we were to take transparency even further in the online ad space. What would it be like if with every ad you saw online, you knew exactly how and why it found its way to your screen?

It wouldn’t be all that tough to pull off, the technology is already there, just not the will. At Bizo, we’ve been imagining a scenario where all of our ads had icons that viewers could click to learn why they were seeing particular ads and what data was used to target them.

Our belief is that that kind of transparency and notification will create lift in advertising success, not detract from it. It’s all about making the consumer more aware of the value trade that’s taking place.

I like to use the example of Google search. A user types something into a search bar and sees content AS WELL AS HIGHLY TARGETED ADS based on what was searched. The user is aware of the tradeoff and appreciates the service – even though Google is tracking everything the user does, there is no (or very little) concern about privacy because the transaction is completely transparent. Because of the targeted nature of the ads, they are often viewed as content and not intrusive, and the ad links can be more relevant than the natural search results.

If we did something similar with display advertising, I believe it would make consumers worry less about why they are seeing particular ads. They would know more about the trade off they engage in to get the content they want to get online. And importantly, they could decide that the trade off isn’t worth it, and opt out if desired. However, for every person that opts-out, I believe there would be 10 that will be more likely to see the ad and appreciate the value trade off that is taking place.

Bizo is working toward launching a feature like this in 2010. We’d love to see others in the industry join us.

Bizo and Multi-Channel Media Attribution

One of the keys to fixing display advertising is finding an alternative to the click-through as a metric for measuring the success of online advertising campaigns.

The most promising – and most practical – form of next-gen measurement is multi-channel media attribution. Multi-channel attribution is measurement of how all marketing channels affect the actions of a prospect or customer. For example, a multi-channel attribution model would measure how adding a display ad campaign to search and email affects conversion rates across all three of these channels. Forrester surveyed 275 Web site decision-makers in 2008 and found that more than half of them believed that attribution would enable them to spend marketing dollars more effectively. Yet only 31 percent were actively using it.

Forrester and others like comScore have been working on methodologies for accurately recording all campaign touch-points in one place to make it easy to compare performance and not record duplicate conversions.

At Bizo, we support the efforts to move in this direction and are constantly talking with our advertisers about the best way to measure online ad success. When you are focused creating top-of-the-funnel opportunities and then moving those prospects down the funnel – as most B2B advertisers are – tracking leads through the sales process can be challenging. But we’re seeing that multi-channel media attribution consistently proves that online display advertising is very effective – well more so than “last-click” methodologies would otherwise indicate.

We want to be able to help marketers tell that story to their bosses. We’re currently working on strategies to more effectively track and provide reporting to prove the efficacy of a display ad whether or not a user clicked. Measurement such as: Who bought? How many times had they seen an ad before they bought? What type of business person is most likely to convert?

As marketers, have you had any success in this type of effort? What has worked and what hasn’t? We’d love your feedback on what capabilities and features we should be thinking about as we build our roadmap to solve these problems for marketers. Please reach out and help us deliver the best possible solutions!

B2B Across the Pond

Today we announced our partnership with The Digital Partnership, a UK-based digital business-advertising network that boasts 6.6 million unique business users. We’ll work with TDP to introduce our bizographic-based ad targeting to the UK. Through Bizo, TDP will get access to the anonymous targeting data for the more than 45 million business professionals in our bizographic database.

We’re excited to work with TDP to extend our reach across the Atlantic and participate in a market that is ripe with opportunity, in part because it's been developing at a slower rate than we’ve seen in the U.S.

I asked Matt Gower, managing director of TDP for his thoughts on the UK market and about the potential he sees in working with Bizo. Here’s what he sent us:

B2B digital advertising is still in its infancy in the UK and those B2B marketers that have come online are largely focused solely on sales generation activity. In fact, just 7% of respondents to a recent survey of B2B marketing professionals, conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau, said they used online media for brand building. This means there is huge market potential which we are confident that Bizo’s bizographics technology is going to help us tap into. The initial response from advertising agencies and brands across the UK B2B market only reinforces this belief. We are very excited about this partnership and what it offers the blossoming UK B2B market.

At Bizo, it’s obvious that our commitment to the B2B marketplace runs deep. We’ve developed a way to use the right data to target the right business audience for the right advertiser. It’s a simple but powerful idea that makes B2B brand building so much more effective than it used to be. Working with a young market such as the one we find in the UK holds huge potential — both for TDP and for Bizo.

Our Vision

At Bizo, we’re passionate about our commitment to privacy and relevancy, the precise reach we offer advertisers and the revenue streams we provide for online B2B publishers.

To share some of these ideas in a more conversational manner, we’re launching a series of videos to talk about our principles and other thoughts that may be of interest to our customers, partners and others in the industry.

To kick it off we wanted to share the Bizo vision. Please take a look at let us know what you think. You can also follow our video channel at YouTube.com/BizoInc.