Types of Behavioral Targeting

The industry, in general, agrees that there are two types of behavioral targeting: ad network behavioral targeting and on site behavioral targeting and. While the basic essence is same for these two categories, it is nevertheless better if you understand the subtleties of the two and be clearly informed which of the two (or both the types) would you like to go ahead with.

Ad network behavioral targeting. This is the type which most marketers are familiar with. The advertisement networks on the web have a lot of websites as their publishers. These publishers display advertisements on behalf of the ad network. Now, the information on a visitor gained from one of the network’s website can easily be leveraged to optimize advertisements being displayed when the same visitor visits another website which is part of the same network.

For example, let us assume that we have an ad network consisting of websites across different verticals: cars, food, entertainment, etc. As a visitor visits different websites across the network, depending on how much time she spends on a page tagged ‘entertainment’, how many music CDs she buys, how many ads and what types of ads does she respond to, a profile of her is made automatically by the ad network. She would be bucketed in one of the many pre-defined buckets of segments by the network. These segments could be like: “Food Junkie”, visitors who like to buy a lot of food items from the internet or “Car Geek”, visitors who like to keep abreast latest technology in cars, hence visiting car-technology pages quite often. There can even be more subtleties in the buckets, like “Car Geek” segment can be refined to have segments like “Sports Car Geek” or “Hybrid Car Geek”.  

Once we have a profile or bucket to which the visitor belongs to, entire marketing efforts can be adapted towards it. Like for the “Car Geek” category, if the visitor visits some travel website, we know that this visitor is extremely interested in cars. So, while traditional ad-networks would have displayed some travel related advertisements, our behavioral targeting enabled ad network would display either car technology related advertisements or a combination of car technology and travel related advertisement. (Perhaps an advertisement for a car technology show in Germany!)

On site behavioral targeting.  Once the visitor lands up on your website, what do you do? Do you treat all your visitors alike? Or, do you target content and promotions on your site depending on the type of visitor? On site behavioral targeting applies the same concepts of ad network behavioral targeting to a visitor experience on a single particular website.  For example, you can segment your website visitors into different buckets: “Loyalists”, “Information Gatherers”, “Frequent Visitors”, “Heavy Spenders”, etc. Depending on what kind of behavior a visitor displays on your website, he would fall into one of your defined customer buckets. Now you can treat each of the buckets separately to maximize your business objectives. To cite an example, you would want to convert “Information Gatherers” into “Spenders” by offering discounts on products they are extremely interested in. And you could treat “Heavy Spenders” differently by up-selling and cross-selling products at the time they make a purchase.

On site behavioral targeting typically kicks in after the visitor has spent some time interacting on your website; only after that you can segment that customer in a bucket and target content accordingly. After all, a visitor has to display some behavior if behavioral targeting is to be of any use. So, typically, when a visitor arrives on your website, on site behavioral targeting can do little or nothing for you.  This problem can be overcome by using both ad network and on site behavioral targeting together. With this approach, when the visitor first arrives on your website, the ad network passes on to you the behavioral profile of the visitor which you can then use to target promotions and content to him right from the first page itself.

To conclude, behavioral targeting is a powerful technology which has two arms: ad network – which helps you target promotions outside your website and on site– which helps you target promotions inside your website.