What is Behavioral Targeting?

Target advertising is an online advertisement that involves the use of sophisticated techniques to reach out to the receptive target audience with particular traits. The technique chosen by an online advertiser always depends on the type of product or the person promoted. The traits considered include demographic factors such as age, gender, education level, employment, race, and economic status or psychographic factors which include personality, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. Some online advertisers may also consider behavioral variables like purchase history, browser history or any recent activity. Since target advertising focuses on certain traits and only considers consumers with strong preference to a brand, the advertising approach helps to eliminate wastage.

How does Behavioral Targeting Work?

Over the years, online advertisement has come to replace traditional forms of advertising such as print magazines, radio, newspapers, and billboards. With the transformation of the information and communication technology (ICT) space, targeted advertising has spread across several technologies like IPTV and mobile environments. It is projected that targeted advertisements will increase radically across different ICT channels. The demand for targeted advertising is increasing due to the emerging new online channels, and companies are interested to minimize wasted advertising through the use of these technology. Current targeted advertising uses second-order proxies such as mobile web consumer activities, associating historical web page consumer demographics with web page access, and contextual advertising.

Social Media Targeting

This is a form of targeted advertising which involves the use of general targeting attributes including geotargeting, behavioral targeting, and socio-psychographic targeting. An example is the case of Facebook; in case a consumer likes a clothing page, they will receive ads based on their liked pages including their areas of residence. This advertising method enables advertisers to be target-specific as they address the needs of consumers in response to their cities and interests. Social media platforms have made it easier for targeting advertisers to understand the interests and likes of consumers on the user profiles. Facebook, for instance, enable advertisers to target consumers based on age, gender, and location.

Mobile devices

Recently, advertising has become more pervasive online in the mobile setting. Using mobile devices for targeted advertising enhances the transmission of consumer information including their location, time, and interests. This enables advertisers to produce adverts that cater to consumer-specific needs and more specific the changing environment.

Content and Contextual Targeting

Content/contextual targeting is considered the most straightforward targeting approach. It involves placing ads in a specific place relative to the available content. Also known as content-oriented advertising, this targeting method can be applied across different mediums. For instance, an online advert about home purchases may include a different advert within the same context, such as insurance ad. This form of advertising can be achieved through an ad matching system that analyses a pages content and presents a relevant ad. However, an ad matching system may fail if it fails to recognize the different between negative and positive correlations which can result in placing contradictory adverts.

Technical Targeting

This form of advertising is associated with the software or hardware status of a user. In technical targeting, an ad is altered in line with the users available network bandwidth. For instance, if a user has a mobile device with limited connection, this ad delivery system will ensure the user receives a smaller ad version that enables faster data transfer rate. Common delivery systems used in technical targeting is the addressable advertising systems which serve ads based on the psychographic, demographic, and behavioral attributes of the consumers. These systems have digital components and are addressable i.e. they have end points that are capable of rendering an ad independently.

Behavioral Targeting

This form of targeting is based on the actions/activities of users and is majorly successful on web pages. Advertisers believe that behavioral targeting produces ads that are relevant to users, and as such enhances the level of consumer influence. For example, if a consumer was looking for plane ticket prices, the targeting system recognizes this and starts showing related adverts to the consumer across unrelated websites. An advantage of this targeting method is that it focuses on the consumers interests instead of the target groups of a particular brand/product. As consumers visit different web sites, site publishers are able to create defined audience segments based on information such as the pages commonly visited, the amount of time spent on a page, links clicked by the consumers, and the things they interact with. Behavioral marketing can be used independently or with other forms of targeting, also referred to as audience targeting. Some of the key advantages of behavioral marketing include it helps advertisers to reach surfers with affinity, access surfers who are not exposed to media campaign, and in reconnecting with customers or prospects.

Related Topics

• What is a Market?
• What is Target Marketing?
• What is Market Segmentation?
• How Many Segments to Target?
• How Do We Segment Consumer Markets?
• Benefit Segmentation
• How Do We Segment Business Markets?
• Using Data for Market Segmentation
• Buying Power Index
• What is Customer Relationship Management?
• What is Behavioral Targeting?
• What is Positioning?
• What is a Positioning Statement?
• What is a Perceptual Map?
• Cultural Factors Affecting Marketing
• International Marketing is Challenging