Behavioural Targeting

Behavioural Targeting is a personalized advertising technique. It bases its advertising on information gained from an individuals’ online behaviour which refers to web browsing like their searches, their interests, their disinterests and pages they visit.

You will find this technique is employed by online advertisers and publishers who focus on improving the level of effectiveness and efficiency of their campaigns and advertisements.

How Behavioural Targeting works?

These people display advertisements, which they believe will appeal to an individual all based on their web browsing behaviour. This way the maximum reach an outcome is achieved as particular advertisements are displayed to the people who would seem most interested them and hence will also work on those people yielding larger outcomes.

This occurs as the advertisements focus on small groups interested in them. A complete history (user history) is made by including other details like purchasing history with behavioural data. To get this right, the appropriate and right DMP (data management platform) must be selected. It is important how one uses the information that has been used to achieve the desired outcome.

Everyone tends to have data collected on their users whether or not it was done intentionally. When the method used is not the right one, the wrong advertisements are displayed leading to no profit giving decreased conversion rates. A data management platform of a high quality will know what to do with the data and how to go about getting the result desired.

How is Behavioural Targeting data collected?

We have heard the term ‘cookies’ and also have had requests from websites to store the cookies when we visit some websites. Cookies are tiny amounts of data that are stored in the temporary memory of the computer and used by these websites that store them. It is through these websites that the selected advertisements are displayed.

The data is automatically removed or deleted as soon as the browser is closed. The data is also sometimes stored in the users’ hard drives to compile data related to online searches, e-shopping, pages visited, etc. Behavioural targeting mainly collects web data which the data management platform combines with non-web behavioural data to decide the optimal and best advertising strategies.

The non-web data consists of day-to-day routine or habits on the web, offline purchase history, mobile data, geographical data/information, any subscription or registration data, etc.

When one subscribes or registers for any facility, the website asks you to fill in some data including geographic, contact, interests, preferences and demographic information. All of this information is of aid to the DMP to accurately predict what would appeal to a particular user and what they might try out when they see the advertisements.

Some people use their cellphones to make transactions, purchases and browse. Tracking the behaviour of the customers via this device will definitely provide a lot of data. This data is again a key to unlock the success of digital advertising. Geographic information will give an idea to the location of the person such that websites or shops and services near the location can be advertised.

IP addresses guide you to the location of a computer. They are numerical codes that serve as an identification for every computer on the internet. The IP addresses will also reveal where the computer has travelled, for how long of duration they stayed there, etc.

All the information is compiled together and users are grouped together to display categorized advertisements. Whenever the user revisits the website, it will display advertisements related to the user’s interests.

What kind of data is useful?

Data management platforms collect information from multiple different sites and compile demographic information employing cookies and web beacons. Information that is extracted is not private like residential addresses or phone numbers, but only the age, gender and other demographic information. The data collected by DMPs including

• Time spent on each website/webpage-

Users might spend long durations if they find what they are looking for or may skim through the page and leave it if they don’t find what they desired. The time spent matters to know the exact interest and the level of interest.

• Links clicked-

Links clicked will give information on the links that the user would get attracted to when searching for something. A pattern will be able to be drawn out.

• Pages visited-

Pages visited will give the information on the user’s interests and information the user generally looks for.

• Specific searches-
• Element interactions-

The portions of the page the user always focuses on and for the maximum time

• Purchases-

The purchases they have made, they might make and if they just visit the site and just view the item will give the information on whether the people might buy or probability of the users buying.

• Time Gaps-

The duration of each time a user visits a particular website shows the importance they give to the website or the interest they have in it.

Benefits of Behavioral Targeting to the customer

Your Internet experience becomes more about you and will resemble an interactive experience. You will find higher efficiency and will also provide you services on a silver platter. Amazon is one of the websites that practice obvious behavioural targeting. You will be viewed as a person with several interests and several views of many interests. Social media and multimedia are also employing this technique making it a more enjoyable experience for you now.

The more personalized the content is, the more it becomes interesting for the users. Content has more reach and is also very effective. The way the ads interact and reach their audience, how much they flatter the audiences matter to get great outcomes.

Retargeting is another method being used now by Facebook and Google to meet the audience’s perspectives. You can find behavioural targeting in email marketing, retargeting, product and service suggestion and in many other circumstances. It is now a regular and common concept that you can find on every other website.

Personalized marketing definitely seems to have exciting prospects and a bright future, which will benefit customers and the service providers.