With the novelty and excitement of Internet companies giving way to sober demands for bottom-line results, marketers must get serious about matching their site strategies to the needs of their target customer segments. The first step should be to identify those segments that do (or could) make up the audience of a site and to tailor its value proposition or consumer experience accordingly.

Our research suggests that current active on-line consumers fall into six segments: Simplifiers, Surfers, Bargainers, Connectors, Routiners, and Sportsters. Each segment is defined by the on-line behavior of its members—traits such as the amount of time they actively spend on-line, the number of pages and sites they access, the time they spend actively viewing each page, and the kinds of sites they visit (Exhibit 1). The challenge is that each of these segments has different needs, so marketers must distinguish among the segments their sites attract and match their site strategies to the needs of the target. Otherwise, those marketers risk attracting unprofitable visitors and alienating the most profitable ones.¹

For marketers whose profitability depends on the number of transactions at their sites, Simplifiers are the most attractive consumers, since they account for more than...