In this highly digitalized marketplace, simply delivering targeted messages to your audience based on their demographic location is not enough. For an effective marketing campaign, one needs to implement behavioral targeting that takes into account behavioral data about how an individual interacts with your business.
Behavioral targeting is a marketing tactic that considers the user’s behavioral attributes to craft a marketing strategy that will connect with them the most. In this technique, marketers take into account an individual’s behavioral data, including how they have interacted with your brand in the past, how active they were in your marketing campaigns, their online activities, and much more, to craft a personalized message that resonates with them.
Behavioral targeting has several benefits, but the primary goal of this marketing tactic is to deliver your ad content to an audience segment that is most likely to be interested in your products and services.
So, now you know that behavioral targeting is based on personalization in which your audience group is divided into different segments based on their interests and attributes. But where is this information collected from? Here are some of the sources that are used to collect user data:
The information is collected through tracking pixels or cookies, which are then processed through data management platforms. Once this information is processed, your audience is segmented, and personalized ads are delivered to encourage them to walk down the sales funnel swiftly.
In today’s world, users value personalization more than anything else. So, when your ads can target your audiences based on their interests and attributes, you can successfully stand out from your competitors.
The delivery of personalized ads and messages can be easily achieved through behavioral targeting. Here are some of the reasons why behavioral targeting is so important in today’s world:
Behavioral targeting helps marketers target audience segments based on their previous behavior on the internet. This ensures that the audience is delivered relevant ads based on their online activities. Through behavioral targeting, you target an audience segment with ads for products that they are already interested in. This not only improves your business’s sales but also enhances the customer experience.
Retargeting is a process by which advertisers target their audience through different ad formats. This means that you are always at the top of their minds when they decide to purchase a product related to your brand or service.
An old marketing strategy called the “rule of seven” states that a potential customer needs to see an advertisement seven times before making a purchase. So, retargeting your audience through behavioral targeting is a great way to turn them into paying customers.
Behavioral targeting focuses on delivering ads to users who are already interested in your products or services. This means that the click-through rates of these ads will also be higher since they are already looking at what you have to offer. These users are most likely to seek further information even if they don’t plan to convert into paying customers any time soon.
Moreover, marketers mustn’t forget that this is also the audience segment with the highest chances of conversion. So, although they might be inclined to buy your products today, you will be their first preference whenever they plan to make a purchase in the near future.
Behavioral targeting helps you build strong, long-term relationships with your customers. Since you learn about their online activities and preferences before displaying your ads, the chances of them feeling annoyed by your messages are very minimal. For instance, if you have noticed that your customer always makes a purchase on Saturday afternoon, you can send them an email about the latest offers and discounts on Saturday morning. This way, you can advertise your products without disturbing them at odd hours.
There are two types of behavioral targeting: On-site behavioral targeting and network behavioral targeting.
On-site behavioral targeting involves placing ads on a particular website to target the right segment of the audience. In this form of targeting, the ads are placed to enhance the user experience and offer a personalized experience.
In this approach, essential information about the user is collected. The sources include their online activities and behavioral attributes that encourage them to take a step toward converting themselves into paying customers.
These ads are usually added to the website’s home page or its product pages to increase the chances of the users viewing your ads and taking appropriate action.
One of the best things about on-site behavioral advertising is that you are targeting an audience group that is already interested in your product, which increases the likelihood of turning them into paying customers.
Let us understand this with an example: An e-commerce website notices that users frequently browse and add running shows to their cart but never complete the purchases. The site displays targeted ads and personalized offers for running shoes or related products to encourage the user to complete the purchase.
Marketers collect cookies and IP information in network behavioral targeting to understand user behavior. You must remember that network behavioral targeting is not an intrusive approach and doesn’t acquire personal data like names, email addresses, or phone numbers to deliver highly targeted ads, making them highly effective without risking the credibility of your business.
The data collected from the cookies and IP information helps interpret the user’s interests and intentions. Once this information is collected, your target audience is divided into different segments, and each segment is shown personalized ads.
Example: A user frequently visits travel blogs and searches for flights on various travel sites. An ad network collects this data and starts showing the user ads for vacation packages, hotel deals, and travel insurance across different websites within the network.
Behavioral and contextual targeting are two of the most popular advertising tactics for delivering highly targeted ads to your audience.
These two forms of marketing tactics are two sides of the same coin but with some slight differences. While behavioral targeting focuses on the user’s behavior on a website, contextual targeting concentrates on the context in which ads are placed on a page relevant to their content.
So, if you frequently visit a sportswear website and look for running shoes, later, when you visit a different website and see an ad for the latest running shoes from the sportswear site you previously visited, you are targeted with behavioral ads. In this approach to targeting, ads are shown based on the user’s past behavior and interest and don’t take into account the context of the ad.
Now, let us take the example of contextual targeting. A user is reading an article about healthy eating on a food blog. They see an ad for a new organic grocery delivery service on the same pages. This ad is placed in the context of the content that the user is currently viewing and doesn’t consider the audience’s previous search activities.
Now, here you must understand that both contextual and behavioral targeting ads are placed on websites relevant to the ad topic and keyword, and the webmaster earns money every time a viewer clicks on the ad.
Just like any personalized marketing campaign, behavioral targeting can also go wrong if the target audience is not segmented properly. Another common mistake marketers make is making too many segments of the audience and failing to deliver targeted ads to each of them. This is the reason why you must segment your audience carefully. Here is how you must organize your audience for behavioral targeting:
A buyer persona is a fictional character that marketers take to be their perfect customer based on the demographic and psychographic data collected from individuals who have already visited your website.
To build a strong buyer persona, you need to answer the following questions:
Question 1: Who are your target customers?
Question 2: Why are they visiting your website?
Question 3: What is restricting them from taking the desired action?
According to the Pareto principle, only 20% of your visitors are responsible for 80% of your sales. So, now you know that instead of targeting each and every website visitor, you must focus only on the 20% who are most likely to convert into paying customers.
Based on the principle mentioned above, you need to organize your audience and divide them into different segments to deliver personalized ads. Once you have segmented them, here is what you need to do:
Once you have built a strong user profile and collected all the data required, it is time to deliver your ads.
Now, the question that arises here is how the ads are delivered. Well, through programmatic advertising, the advertisers participate in a real-time bidding process, and the winning bidder can display their ads.
The whole process takes place in the blink of an eye. So, when a user visits a website that supports behavioral targeting, the ad exchange considers the user’s profile. Based on this information, numerous advertisers who want to display their ads on the website participate in a real-time bid, and the winning bidder gets the chance to display their ads.
Your struggle doesn’t end after you win the bid. You must also continuously optimize your behavioral targeting strategy to ensure your target audience is engaged with your products and services. For this, you need to monitor how your target audience interacts with your ads continuously. Based on the data collected, you might be required to fine-tune your ads and adjust the parameters of ad display frequency to have the maximum impact.
Behavioral targeting is a strong contender when it comes to crafting a marketing strategy that reaps the maximum results. Hence, we can predict that the future of behavioral targeting looks bright.
Behavioral targeting considers what users are doing online or when they visit your app or website, helping marketers craft a more personalized marketing strategy. And who doesn’t like things that are custom-made for them?
Personalized messaging increases your chances of generating the maximum ROI from your campaign. Your customers are also more likely to be interested in your ads, making it a win-win situation for both you and your audience.
That said, businesses that have leveraged behavioral marketing tactics are definitely witnessing positive results, and if you are aiming for the same, start strategizing today!