BTBuckets Real-Time Segmentation and Behavioral Targeting Tool

Segmentation & Dynamic Content Targeting Free Tool – Reviewed

If you are into web analytics, you have almost certainly heard the phrases “Behavioral Targeting” and “Segmentation” more than once. Today I want to invest some of my time to review a new free behavioral and segmentation tool called BTBuckets. I know that there are lots of behavioral targeting tools out there, but the reason why I have decided to review BTBuckets preferably to the others, its because BTBuckets delivers a solution that I think is both straightforward, intelligent and different from the other behavioral and segmentation tools I’ve seen so far. In this review, I will do my best to explain to you why.

I’ve heard about BTbucket.com website, when I searched the web for Behavioral targeting tools two weeks ago. First I thought that this is just another web analytical tool, but their tag line revealed something else. BTBuckets’ tag line “Engage your users with free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.” suggested that BTBuckets offers a visitor-engaging tool, something that I have eager to find.

So what is actually “Visitor Engaging Tool”?

I know that many of you have been drilling down your web analytics reports, doing A/B Multivariate testing and optimizing your website design, features and content, in order to increase your website ROI and total conversions. However, the modifications you made to your website design, was done after you’ve read detailed custom reports and analyze it, and then you came to a conclusion that some changes need to be done. The fact is that you’ve responded to your website visitors needs by examining and evaluating the data. The change was probably made by searching for a mid-point that was common to a large group of visitors.

Visitor Engaging tool that is based on segmentation and behavioral targeting, in most cases gives you those 2 main benefits:

Tracking visitors data using segmentation to distinguish between several types of website visitors.
Apply actions for a specific segment (bucket) of visitors, without influencing the other visitors, which do not belong to that segment that you were targeting. Those ‘buckets’ are created according to specific visitor’s behavior on your website, and that’s the reason its called behavioral targeting. You target a specific visitor according to his behavior on your site.

In some site this feature is referred as “Dynamic Content Delivery”, “Actionable Analytics”, “Real-Time Dynamic Content targeting”, etc. A smart tool will be simple enough for a large audience to understand and sophisticated enough to offer track data in real-time, advanced segmentation properties and allow any website administrator/webmaster/analytics consultant, to apply actions in real-time, according to a specific previously defined segments.

So, is there any specific tool that can deliver all that, and for free?

Yes! there is, and its called BTBuckets.

What is that name “BTBuckets”?

As far as I’ve understand, BT stands for “Behavioral Targeting”, and Buckets are actually “Segments”. So no wonder what their website title states and I quote: “Free Behavioral Targeting and Segmentation“. (Yep, found it, is is behavioral targeting, found it one their definitions page).

I’ve decided to signup and try this tool. I’ve said it’s FREE, right ?

So up we go, I’ve implemented the JavaScript code after a short registration process and logged in to see all the glory. I’ve decided to test it on this blog, just to see how thing are working.

BTBuckets’ Administration Section

The dashboard is the first screen that you see, after you logged in using your email and password. You have several tabs: “dashboard”, “buckets”, “targeting”, “reports” and “tags”. I will explains about each page individually.

Dashboard

The dashboard is where you can see a summary of your active buckets (segments) that you have created in the “buckets” section. By default you get 4 active buckets: “Social Media”, “Search”. “Returning Visitor” and “New Visitor”. These 4 buckets will be field by active visits when a the segment (bucket)/target behavior has been met. So when a user visits your site and referred to your website through a Social Media website, you will see one visit in the “Social Media” bucket.

“Social Media” sites that are registered as part of the segment are: Wikipedia, Stumbleupon, netvibes, bloglines, LinkedIn, Facebook, del.icio.us, Digg, Twitter, Technorati, faves and others. I guess that the JavaScript use Regex to subtract the address from the referrer URL, in order to decided where the visitor came from.

You can add your own segments (buckets), buy clicking the “Add” (red) button. Furthermore, you can see how many requests have been made to your BTBuckets account, active targets and on the bottom right side, you can see the active buckets and the number of visits per bucket (segment).

Buckets

In the “buckets” section, you can see all the buckets (segments), including the default ones and the ones that you have created. For every bucket you can click “show all behaviors for this bucket”, in order to see the segments/behavior formula which was used to determine whether a visit should be included in that specific bucket. For each behavior you can see pageviews for each behavior.

For example, in the “Search” (default bucket), a visit that its referrer equals to: (google\.).+(&|\?)q=([a-zA-Z0-9+-]+) OR (bing\.).+(&|\?)q=([a-zA-Z0-9+-]+) OR (search\.yahoo\.).+(&|\?)p=([a-zA-Z0-9+-]+) , goes to the search bucket. This is a Regular-Expression syntax (Regex), and that means that any visit from Google, Bing or Yahoo search engine, should count as a view inside the “Search” bucket.

Creating a New Bucket

Of course you don’t want to be left just with the default buckets, and you want to create new buckets by yourself, to perfectly suit your data mining and behavioral targeting needs, so you need to create a new bucket by yourself. The fact is that it is very EASY to do. You have two options in the “create new bucket” page:

Settings
Here you supply the name of the bucket, give it a friendly name, how many days users have to complete the expected behavior, for how many days keep the user in the bucket and you can select a previously created bucket or a default bucket to overwrite it. After you’ve finished the first part, click “Save and configure the expected profile”.
Profile/Behaviors
Here you have all BTBuckets’ metrics options: behavior & IP Intelligence. The “Behavior” includes: came from, visited a page, event; “IP Intelligence” includes: geolocation, ISP, organization.

You can click and add each segment and configure each one with its own properties. After that all you have to do is to click the “Save your bucket” button and you are done! — Very Simple, isn’t it?

Targeting

The “targeting” section is where the fun begins. Here you actually create an ‘action’. It means that you connect one or more buckets/segments to execute the target code. The target code can be any HTML, JavaScript or Pre-defined coded that BTBuckets supplies. You can give you target a name, choose for which site to activate it (if you have more than one site in your account), and you can decide whether to insert the code manually or automatically. After you’ve finished setting up your target (action), click “Save your new target”, and again, You are done!

I think it just can’t get simpler than that. In just a few steps you can create segmentation (buckets), assign actions to deliver dynamic content targeting to your visitors, based on predefined segments and watch reports. So let’s see what hides behind the “Reports” section in BTBuckets.

Reports

I was ready for a sophisticated web analytics reporting tools that will get me all confused, but WAIT, what is that? — Few buckets, “requests this month” and “percent of monthly cap” ?

No, I am wearing my glasses, and I have a high resolution screen to see all the page as a whole, this is really something that you don’t see everyday and it is called SIMPLICITY. BTBuckets knew that in order to keep up with the competition or stay away from competition, depends on how you look at that, they have to create a solitary product, something that will bring the main important features that are most relevant and important for website owners, but still keep everything relatively simple. I think that they did a really great job here.

The “Reports” section will give you a quick overview of how your buckets perform. By examining the data carefully, you can see your visitors, not just as digits but grouped as buckets. You can easily get a grasp on where your visitors came from, what they did on your website, and practically everything that you want to track using the segments that you’ve created earlier.

By making changes in the “targeting” section, you can therefore optimize your website design to fit a specific bucket (segment) that you see that most of your important visitors/prospects are. Optimizing your website has never been so simple.

By clicking on a specific bucket, you can see a chart that will compare the bucket’s metrics of newly entered bucket’s visitors against already existed bucket’s visitors.

Don’t Skip This One!

You are probably asking yourself “What?! – This is it?”, and I say “Yep!, and I am just glad that this is it!”. Many of today’s web analytics consumers only use very few options that the most popular solutions offer. I mean sure I would be glad to have as many options as the company can provide, but at the end, I want to make something with the data that was being collected and use it for something applicable BTBuckets takes segmentation, mixed it with a VERY easy-to-use user interface, added real-time web analytics & dynamic content targeting to the mix, and you finally get a simple yet powerful behavioral targeting and segmentation product, that actually can make a change to your website.

BTBuckets created video tutorials for beginners, whom just started using this free tool. Furthermore, you can integrate BTBuckets with Google Analytics with BTBuckets for Google Analytics Plugin (I leave it up to you to explore).

If you have any questions, you can take a part in their online forums and follow them on Twitter. BTBuckets’ knowledge base will give you everything you need to get started.

“Free Real-time Behavioral Targeting and Segmentation tool. Create segments (buckets) and apply Actions in just a few steps. Optimizing your website for higher conversions has never been so Easy!”

There are customers’ success stories that have utilized BTBuckets in their business. In the case study section, you can read about Tel3 improving conversions by 136% using this product!

If you ask me, this is probably the first tool I would try when I search for a real-time segmentation, behavioral targeting actionable web analytics. It is free and its really simple to install and use. For many of us, this will in all likelihood be the only tool that you’ll need. So what are you waiting, visit BTBuckets.com and try it out.

Live Web Analysis Conclusion: Highly Recommended!

BTBuckets Review