What Is Behavioral Scoring in Account-Based Advertising, and Why Does It Matter?

Let me tell you a story about Ocean and his friends.

This is Ocean. You want Ocean to become your client. You showed Ocean an ad. Ocean clicked on it and filled out your lead form.

Ocean is perfect. Ocean is also rare.

Not everyone who ends up on your landing page is like Ocean. Most will exit your page without leaving their contact details — especially if they are CxOs at an enterprise.

So, what do you do?

Look for signals in targets’ online behavior that go beyond the lead form and use them.

Meet Rusty and Tess. They are Ocean’s colleagues.

Rusty and Tess have also seen your ad.

Rusty clicked on it and stayed on your landing page for 20 seconds but didn’t fill out the lead form. Tess also clicked on your ad but didn’t visit the landing page.

Both Rusty and Tess are qualified leads. More importantly, Rusty’s behavior indicates a strong interest in your offer.

The problem is that you will never find out about Rusty’s and Tess’s interests unless you capture those signals!

How do you do that? You guessed it — by using behavioral scoring in advertising!

What is behavioral scoring in advertising?

Behavioral scoring in advertising is a crucial metric in account-based marketing (ABM) that allows you to measure the efficiency of your ad campaigns. It takes into account all of the signals from your ad campaigns and translates them into a score for each account and person that you have targeted.

Your ad impact is greater than you think.

Ad impressions, ad clicks, and time spent on the webpage are all-important behavioral signals. By summarizing all of these signals in one behavioral score, you can identify leads that otherwise go unnoticed.

Let’s get back to the Ocean and his friends.

Usually, we would hand Ocean off to the sales development team and ignore Rusty and Tess. We marketers often fail to understand that Rusty is as important as Ocean. But, he clicked on your ad, went to your landing page, and stayed there for 20 seconds! Today, when the average attention span is 4 seconds, such behavior from a prospect is priceless.

How can you use behavioral scoring?

Identify sales-ready accounts and people in time.You won’t miss any more leads that your ad campaign has generated.

Better prioritize the accounts and people your sales teams should contact first.The behavioral score lets you know which people and accounts are the most intrigued by your offer.

Measure campaign spend more accurately.Get a clearer picture of where your marketing budget went. Now that you know that both Ocean and Rusty were interested in your offer, you spread the cost between two leads within one account, instead of putting it all on Ocean.

Behavioral scoring allows marketers to be more accurate in their calculations, to be more accountable, and most importantly, to see not just Ocean but all of his friends in that dark marketing funnel.