Have you ever wondered how you started seeing ads about a particular product soon after you looked at a similar product online? Well, it’s behavioural targeting that does the trick.

Behavioural targeting is an advanced way of ad targeting that advertisers use to show highly relevant ads to your potential customers on the basis of their web usage history. It’s done by anonymously analysing users’ browsing behaviour and programmatically identifying ad types that are relevant for each user.

Out of the many tools used to track a user’s data, the most common one are cookies. Cookies are small files stored in the system for collecting information about your engagement with the websites. They help in tracking the users’ tastes and preferences.

Behavioural targeting is a smart way to find the right consumers for your product. At the beginning of the online advertisement era, the most popular targeting available were reaching users on the basis of demographic variables such as age, sex, location etc. With behavioral targeting, you get an extra layer of information that can be used to target your customers more precisely.

Before we move on, if you need any kind of help with your digital marketing campaigns, you should definitely reach out to us. Check out our team. Let’s talk.

Why Online Behavioral Targeting?

Greater conversions: When you present your product ads mainly to those customers who are interested in it, conversions knock your door! When the targeting gets precise, the chances of conversions also increase.

Improved CTR: A higher click-through rate can be the end result of creating ads that are relevant and useful to your customers. In the case of non-targeted ads, the customers may see ads of products which they are not interested in. Behavioral targeted ads help in finding the right customers for your products.

Win-Win Situation for both advertisers and customers: From the advertisers’ viewpoint, tracking customer behavior helps them in knowing the buying propensity of customers and thereby, enables them to restructure their strategies.

Whereas, to the consumers, it would benefit them as the ads they see are mostly of the products they are interested in.

Steps in Behavioral Targeting

Collection: Analysis tools like Google Analytics and Facebook pixels anonymously get your website usage data when you visit websites that have these tracking codes. It doesn’t track you personally; but, identifies your browser or user account without your identity details.

For example: let’s say you sell books online, and you use Google Analytics for tracking and measuring user engagement on the website. When a customer visits your site, Google gets the information about his/her activity through Google Analytics. When someone does ads on Google for selling books, it targets the customers who showed interest in books by visiting websites that sell books like yours

Analysis: After confirming that the collected data is not robot-generated, it is closely perused on the ad networks’ server programmatically, and data is put through a very advanced machine learning process.

Segmentation: Post data analysis, they are sectioned into different targetable groups, as per the behaviors recorded. For instance, the users who are interested in books, are separated into the particular category. Similarly, a whole lot of such distinctions are made in order to find the right customers.

Application: In this final step, the segmented data is put to action. To be more precise, it is finally employed in the  Ad campaigns with respect to the category of the product. Consequently, the chances of conversions going up increases.

Some Tips on Effective Behavioral Targeting

Have a Clear Picture of Your Goals:  Whatever be your marketing strategy, it must be focused on your business goals. Without knowing what output you seek from OBT (Online Behavioral Targeting), the whole process may go futile.

Identify the right segmented group for your product: Find out the exact channel of customers that suit your business. The goal here is to link your product with the right group at the right time on the right platform.

Learn the customers well: A clear understanding of the targeted customers bears a vital role in OBT. Find out about their nature of shopping online. There can be customers who opt month-end shopping, while some others prefer it every weekend. Also, you can see whether the targeted group belongs to the same geographical location or different ones. You can develop your marketing strategy accordingly.

Choice of Best Tools/Networks: This is yet another factor which determines your success. The advertising network you choose should give you outputs that go hand in hand with your goals. It should be able to serve you with the right type of users/customers.

Facebook and Google are the most popular and effective platforms that you can use right now.

In short, behavioral targeting is all about collecting online data of the users to allocate ads in the places that they’d ‘sell’ the most. Incorporating this strategy to the business allows online retailers to meet their right prospects, which makes it cost-effective.

Why don’t you go ahead and try OBT for your business? Want assistance? We’re here to help 🙂