What is Behavioral Targeting?

It is surely the new “buzzword”, everybody is excited about it, “pundits” tout is as the next big thing. But what does the term behavioral targeting really mean? Is it a fad or does it really promise to deliver value to marketers and their respective businesses? Let us try to explore this new field a bit in depth.

Simply put, behavioral targeting, as its name hints, is effective and targeted marketing of products and services to a select group of consumers exhibiting a particular behavior. In other words, it aims to target the marketing message to a segment which has the highest likelihood of acting on that message.

For example, if you are in tourism business, your target customer base would include individuals who are travel freaks. Of course, one of the traditional ways of reaching them could be to advertise on travel related websites or blogs. After all, it is quite obvious that people who visit such blogs and websites would likely want to purchase a travel package from you.

But you must understand that such a method is sub-optimal. The intent of visitors to travel blogs and websites is quite heterogeneous.  Some of them are there just to gather information, some of them stumbled there accidentally, and some of them are actually looking for reviews of travel packages. Wouldn’t you want to treat visitors with different intents with different marketing messages?

This is what behavioral targeting all about. It enables you to snipe a customer according to what behavior she displays on the website or across different websites. (See types of behavioral targeting for more details). For example, if Jennifer is a repeat visitor to your site, had spent more than 150 seconds on Shipping Policy page on her first visit, and is located in New York City, you would want to treat her differently than Jamie who is located Los Angeles, is accessing your site for the first time and has already visited your competitor’s website.

Behavioral Targeting allows you to treat your customers/visitors according to who they really are: individuals. Targeting on the Internet works exactly the same way salespeople work in traditional retail stores, judging what does the person walking in the store has in mind and persuade him accordingly. It is truly a next step in evolution of how marketing done on the web. If you are any way related to marketing on the Internet, which is very likely given you have read this far, make sure you get an in depth knowledge of this exciting field in order to reap the benefits it has to offer.