Behavioral targeting ads refer to a range of techniques and technologies used by Internet advertisers and publishers. In this method, visitors’ data captured by landing pages and websites based on the ads are displayed to users. There are two types of behavioral targeting, namely, onsite behavioral targeting and network behavioral targeting. The basics of these two are same. Now we will discuss them briefly.
Onsite behavioral targeting: Behavioral targeting techniques may be applied to any type of business for advertising online. It either benefits the property or improves the visitor experience typically through the increased spending levels or increased conversion rates.
The typical approach to the onsite behavioral targeting starts by using web analytics. The visitors are split into different categories based on web analytics. The categorization is based on the persona of the visitors. This will give a starting point to the website operators about users what have to show in terms of layout, navigation, and content. Publishers use different tools to find out the persona of the visitors.
Most commonly, cookies are used in this process. For every visitor, a unique cookie is assigned and they will track the entire web journey by the user with that browser. Based on the cookie data, tools used by the publisher rules are made on what to serve to a particular user. Again, this data can be used to combine with a visitor’s purchase history and known demographic data to produce more information that helps to target even more accurately.
For example, you categorize your business website visitors into different types, such as information collectors, spenders etc. Once they visit your website, a cookie is dropped into their web browser, it will collect the data that the user uses on the browser. The data help to provide exact ads to them. If the offers are good, information collectors can become spenders. Again can make the spenders into loyal customers by cross selling and other practices.
Ad network behavioral targeting: Ad network behavioral targeting is familiar for most marketers. The way of behavioral targeting by the ad networks is different from the individual websites. Ad networks serve for many different websites with many ads. Therefore, they are able to make a different strategies for Internet users based on the demographic data. For example, a user seen on male fashion websites, business websites and football websites, the reasonable guess would be that the user is a male one.
Behavioral targeting will increase the effectiveness of the campaign. If it is done without user, knowledge is illegal in many countries as per consumer protection, data protection and privacy laws, and considered as browser security breach.
