Behavioral Targeting - for Effective Online Advertising

“Behavior is anything that indicates interest. It’s profile targeting.” —Jeff Hirsch, president,
Revenue Science. Behavioral Targeting is now the crucial factor in online advertising. This is a technique which can increase conversions or effectiveness of any campaign.

"Behavioral targeting segments the audience based on observed and measured data—the pages or sites users visit, the content they view, the search queries they enter, the ads they click on, the
information they share on social Internet sites and the products they put in online shopping carts.This data is combined with the time, length and frequency of visits. Recency counts a lot, too— data from two weeks ago is far less accurate at predicting interest than that from two days ago." - According to eMarketer

Behavioral targeting can be broadly segregated in to 2 categories.

1) Identifying customers by category: Identifying the customers and sending them to the relevant category they belong to. For example, If a visitor visits a News portal, and he is looking for news on travel industry in India, sending him to the relevant category and placing your ads relating to travel industry in India. This would be more effective method of relevancy for ads, and their are higher chances of the ads to convert at a low rate.

2) Contextual Targeting : This method of advertising is the most successful among all other methods of behavioral targeting. In this method, you select a specific set of keywords that you look to advertise and your ad will appear for such keywords. Google has definitely dominated in this industry. Their are many other players in the market like Tacoda ( acquired by AOL), Revenue science and etc.


Below is the diagram that shows that types of adtargeting that are effective.


Also see below the best performing online advertising tactics according to the US online marketers