Understanding Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is an advertising delivery technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. Behavioral marketing can be used on its own or in conjunction with other forms of targeting based on factors like geography, demographics or the surrounding content.

Behavioral Targeting is based upon information collected regarding an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. This behavioral history is then used to deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them.

Most add delivery platforms identify visitors by assigning a unique id cookie to each and every visitor to the site thereby allowing them to be tracked throughout their web journey, the platform then make a rules-based decision about what content to serve.

B2B sites have traditionally used a simplified version of Behavioral Targeting by aggregating content into channels and then allowing advertisers to target those channels. Behavioral Targeting systems go beyond content targeting by monitoring visitor response to site content and learn what is most likely to generate a desired conversion event. The downside of Behavioral Targeting for B2B publishers is that onsite Behavioral Targeting requires a relatively high level of traffic before statistical confidence levels can be reached regarding the probability of a particular offer generating a conversion from a user.

B2B publishers interested in behavioral targeting should consider Advertising Networks as an alternative since advertising networks offer both the technology needed for Behavioral Targeting and the larger user base that individual B2B websites lack.  Additionally, Advertising Networks use Behavioral Targeting in a different way than individual sites since they serve many adverts across many different sites, they are able to build up a picture of the likely demographic makeup of internet users allowing Advertising Networks to sell audiences rather than sites.