Does privacy matter to most Facebook users? Take a look at the chart below, and judge for yourself (weekly unique visitors to facebook’s privacy settings pages):

Even after all the recent mainstream media coverage and debate surrounding Facebook’s controversial beacon program, online privacy in general, and Facebook making available universal beacon opt-out — traffic to Facebook’s privacy settings pages has essentially been flat. NOT A GOOD SIGN!

It’s likely that the average Facebook user DOES care about their privacy, and know they should do something about it, but are mostly unaware or don’t know what they can or should do. Should Facebook be doing more around online privacy education? There is a lot of unintended sharing going on, and I think it is in Facebook’s long term best interest to do so.

Formula. Diapers. Clothing. Nursery Items. Car Seats. Strollers.

When I think of a high value market segments, one that comes to mind is young and expecting mothers. Making new purchase decisions on these items and more, young and expecting mothers are the target consumers of many baby product companies. If I were an online brand marketer for Johnson and Johnson (makers of the always popular Johnson’s Baby Shampoo), I would be interested in knowing where I can advertise to most effectively reach this target group.

The current industry standard approach is a contextual ad campaign. A typical contextual ad campaign matches site content with target group interests. Under this approach, known sites with baby- or mom-focused content would be the appropriate ad placement location. Examples of these locations could be momstoday.com or singlemom.com. Unfortunately, this is speculative and offers a limited scope. After all, young and expecting mothers don’t spend ALL of their online time at these very segmented sites. Behavior Match is Compete’s new approach to this challenge of matching target consumers with effective online media buys among all sites they visit. Using Compete’s Behavior Match product suite, we can drill down to online properties that have a greater than average saturation of young and expecting mothers, not just the contextually relevant sites.

A Behavior Match Buyer report highlights all websites that are visited by young and expecting mothers, indexed against the chance of finding this behavioral segment on the average site across the internet. To run this report, Compete has identified 1,000,000 online consumers in the month of January, 2008 as young and expecting mothers.

*Read as “In the month of January, 809,835 young and expecting mothers visited the Yahoo! Domain. Yahoo! Scores a 98, indexed against the average composition of young and expecting mothers, or just under the internet average (100).”

Top 10 Domain Findings:

• The largest internet properties have the highest reach among young and expecting mothers.
• These domains index very close to average; this is oftentimes true because of their sheer size. i.e. Who doesn’t use Yahoo!?
• Among this list, aol.com is the best advertising opportunity for Johnson and Johnson to reach young and expecting mothers (wikipedia.org does not accept advertising).

The focus of this report is the torso sites on the internet (50,000 to 500,000 monthly unique visitors) that have a high concentration of young and expecting mothers.

*Read as “In the month of January, 31,000 young and expecting mothers visited kidprintables.com. Kidprintables scores a 8,895, indexed against the average composition of young and expecting mothers.”

Torso Domain Findings:

• While these internet properties have lower scope, on a per impression basis they much more effectively reach the target segment.
• A campaign focused across many torso domains has the same reach opportunity as a larger internet property.
• A trend among these sites is that they are focused on work from home / internet jobs.

Compete offers another product in the Behavior Match product suite focused on large site segmentation. Behavior Match In-Site segments the larger internet properites to take advantage of their large scope while still effectively targeting young and expecting mothers.

This table takes a comparitive look at the performance of top subdomains on yahoo.com and msn.com during the month of January 2008 at reaching young and expecting mothers.

In-Site Findings (yahoo.com and msn.com):

• On a per impression basis, many MSN channels more effectively reach young and expecting mothers than similar Yahoo! channels.
• Top performing channels for Johnson and Johnson to focus on with their ad campaign include Real Estate, Health, and TV.
• Channels that less effectively reach the young and expecting mother segment are Help, Astrology, and Autos.

Takeaways:

• Contextual placement alone is outdated. Similar properties across two top portals don’t even show the same reach among the target segment.
• Targeted advertising space doesn’t have to be expensive. Matching highly effective advertising opportunities from Behavior Match with those offering low CPM saves $$!
• Bargaining with top portals is possible. Fight for the placement on the health channel.
• This product is EASY. No more wrapping your head around fancy targeting schema.

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Ladies and gentlemen….start your engines. These famous words of racing will kick off the Nascar Sprint Cup Series at the 50th running of the Daytona 500 this Sunday at 2pm EST. 168,000 screaming spectators will emerge from Nascar hibernation, which commenced at the Homestead-Miami Speedway last November, to fill the stands of the 2.5 mile tri-oval race track. With Nascar’s growing popularity, Compete used its panel of 2 million people to gauge fan excitement, and answer some burning questions before the 2008 season begins.

We first rev up the engine with the typical unique visitor increase in January; excitement sets in as February nears. The number of unique visitors to Nascar.com increased 25% month-over-month to 2.2 million visitors. However, what’s more surprising is that visitation was down 14% year-over-year. This means Nascar.com needs to floor it to reach last February’s calendar year high of 5.3 million visitors.

Going into Daytona, we next wanted to determine which driver would sit on the pole position based on the number of visitors viewing driver-specific information on Nascar.com. “Boogity Boogity Boogity…let’s go racing”

• As we work our way around the track, we find 7 cars swappin’ paint in 5.5 to 7 thousand visitor turn. Rubbin’ is racing ya’ll, but keep it clean
• Beginning to pull away from the pack at 8 thousand visitors, Kyle Busch is holding steady in the M&M sponsored Toyota
• Just ahead of Busch, the Chevrolets of Jimmie Johnson and Mark Martin (sorry Aric, Mark has seniority) are running strong between the 10 to 16 thousand visitor mark
• Behind our leader, we find Jeff Gordon and Kasey Kahne working together to track down Tony Stewart’s Home Depot car who is taking the high line in the 27 thousand visitor turn
• And nearly lapping all of the competitors is our leader and pole position winner is Dale Earnhardt, Jr. with a whopping 64,000 visitors

While Jr. is certainly enjoying his lead how are Nascar sponsors performing before spending $550,000 on a 30-second spot for this Sunday’s race? Let’s take a look at which sponsor websites are naturally attracting more Nascar Enthusiasts today.

Using Compete’s Behavior Match, an online media planning tool, we created a custom segment of Nascar Enthusiasts and gathered all the websites they visited in January 2008. We then scored this segment against the total internet browsing population to determine the top-10 major car sponsor sites (think big stickers) that Nascar Enthusiasts visit more often than the average internet browser. As of January, Kasey Kahne’s Dodge Budweiser sits atop the sponsor leader board – read as Nascar Enthusiasts are 7 times more likely to visit Budweiser.com.

We’ve dropped the green and we know which drivers and sponsors are getting initial traction. But Nascar is a long season and anything can happen - we’ll have to keep an eye out to see who takes the checkered…

I recently decided to play around with Compete’s Behavior Match™ online media planning product tool. I took on the fictional persona of a progressive lending company, Halfpipe & Hairband Lending LLC., which is trying to target the disenfranchised younger generations dealing with the shocking realization that you actually have to pay back student loans and that buying/maintaining a house is expensive. ”Bummer dude!”. For those who are not familiar with Behavior Match™, the idea is to watch all the websites your segment visits for a given month and determine the best places to find them. Below is a quick example of one of the reports generated by Behavior Match™.

The question remains; where will H&H Lending find great advertising opportunities online to reach these Gen-Y and Gen-X credit seekers? We will start with seniority and the findings for Generation-X users (defined as age 28 -40). Here are some great sites where credit seeking prospects are over-indexing:

• One of the highest sites to over-index was an Australian gambling site which allows US citizens the ability to ”legally” bet (unless they actually win big and get caught) called lasseters.com.au. This website over-indexed by 950, which can be read as, Gen-X credit seekers are 9.5x more likely to visit this site than the average web surfer.
• It looks like those drug commercials with their vivid imagery of a life made more beautiful has a big effect on the Gen-X’ers. In July, weight loss drug sites like zoeta.com, encouraged large volumes of web traffic to their home page.
• Possibly one of the largest missed opportunities, and my personal favorite, comes from the website western.goldbucklenetwork.com. This may be the perfect time to reconnect with the old west enthusiast inside all of us because 22.5% of the Gen-X segment will never forget the Alamo.

Alright, enough about the people pushing to be king of the hill; it’s now time to tap into the vigorous youth of Generation Y (defined as ages 18-27):

• From shopping, entertainment, celebrity gossip and social networking, it is not surprising to see a huge over-index for online dating sites. The top domain for September was dateroad.com, and the Gen-Y segment were 15x more likely to visit this website than the average internet surfer.
• Mid-twenties is about the time you realize that all those frivolous charges you jammed on your credit card in college are starting to catch up with you. Many Gen-Y surfers concerned with their credit over-indexed on sites such as requestcredit.com and mycredittoday.com.
• For the Gen-Y guys, it clearly showed that no one is immune to a ”too good to be true” deal on the internet with 16.5% of the segment heading to footballjersey4free.com. Similarly, August marked the highest over-index for victoriassecret.com. Does anyone remember the promotion that month? My copy of the catalog always goes missing… At any rate, there is no doubt that Gen-Y is trying to look good for their internet dates.

There were also some interesting high-level findings to take away from the study.

All the sites mentioned in this blog are within the top 50 over-indexed domains, you really don’t have to look hard to find good sites you may not have heard of or considered.

• Gen-Y credit seekers are more in line with their 20-something syndrome and are spending the bulk of their time online looking for dates, worrying about their credit score and getting fresh new threads (honestly, who shops in person these days?).
• The other big takeaway was some troubling insight into the minds of the Gen-X’ers. When it comes to credit seekers, Gen-X is about three steps away from their midlife crisis. They are visiting sites that cater to the use of gambling, quick fix health pills, 10-gallon hats, home improvements and the desperate need for quick money right now!

From all of us here at Halfpipe and Hairband Lending LLC., we are proud to announce that integrating some of these websites into our marking mix helped Q4 close with the biggest gains for personal lending accounts in the 6-month history of our fictitious company! We would like to wish all Gen-X and Gen-Y credit seekers a speedy getaway from student loans, home improvement projects that don’t result in home destruction and plenty of time to watch old western films in the center console of their brand new Corvette.

Recently I was thinking about the prepaid wireless market, comparing carriers’ strategies and how consumers are reacting to marketing. The prepaid wireless market is especially competitive - since consumers have so much control. Once their prepaid minutes are used up, the customer can buy more, or they can use a different carrier or phone. Worse, some customers may have multiple prepaid plans with carriers and switch back and forth between them. Prepaid wireless service is definitely a tough market to stay connected with your customers.

TracFone, a leading prepaid wireless carrier with over 9 million active subscribers, has been known for its high customer retention rates among prepaid carriers. I wanted to investigate TracFone’s strategy for keeping retention rates high, so I looked at its online customers’ consideration of competitors’ websites using a new Compete product called Behavior Match. Behavior Match measures overlap of a targeted segment (TracFone online customers) with domains (competitor websites) against the overlap of the general Internet browsing population (IBP) to the same sites. An index over 100 means that the targeted segment frequents the given site more than the average consumer does.

With a Composition Index of 333, Virgin Mobile leads the pack in terms of TracFone online customers’ consideration. TracFone customers are over 3X more likely to visit Virgin Mobile’s website than the average American Internet user is likely to. The inclusion of several online agent sites could mean that TracFone customers are interested in comparison shopping or that they need extra support in making their decisions. The exclusion of Big 4 sites (vzwshop.com being the lone exception) is also interesting in that it signals that prepaid and regional carriers better suit TracFone customers’ needs.

Since Virgin Mobile is the most considered competitor, I took a deeper look into the interaction between TracFone online customers and Virgin Mobile consideration.

This chart shows the percentage of TracFone’s online customer base that is considering Virgin Mobile. Since Q3 2006 TracFone online customers’ consideration of VMU has more than doubled. There is a distinct upward trend here and it indicates that TracFone is increasingly exposed to VMU. To be fair, not all of the TracFone customers will make the switch to VMU, but the steady growth in consideration indicates that more of them will.

This is an alarming trend. Acting on this type of insight would require targeting TracFone customers that are considering Virgin Mobile specifically, which can be tricky. Obviously TracFone can’t advertise on Virgin Mobile’s website, and advertising on contextual sites (like tech review sites) can be expensive. In this example we evaluated TracFone against competitive sites, but Behavior Match can be used to index over one million sites on the web, so it could be used to target segments of consumers in almost endless ways. (Check out this automotive-focused blog post for a different perspective.) TracFone could find intentionally non-contextual sites that these specific customers visit in high concentration, and advertise retention programs to them there.

In the already hyper-competitive prepaid wireless market, every advantage helps. It will be interesting to see if TracFone can reverse this trend in the coming quarter, year and beyond.