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The Future Of Behavioral Targeting Online
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Traditionally, marketing has been all about finding potential customers geographically, demographically and psychographically. You would find out who was buying your product or service and would determine where they lived, how old they were and what they were like. Then, you would try to market your business to more people just like that. That was fine for print advertising, which has a low level of interactivity anyway, but with the Internet, this approach is too narrow.
Behavioral Targeting Solves a Business Problem
Businesses have also been frustrated because traditional demographic targeting ensures that many potential customers are missed. You may be selling flowers primarily to brides-to-be, but what if men want to buy your flowers, too? Worse, what if you have a business that is not easily reduced to traditional demographics? For example, what if you are selling mortgages? Mortgages are something that just about everyone needs at some point, regardless of their race, background or location. However, people only need a mortgage when they are about to buy a home. How do you figure out when someone is about to buy a house?
Behavioral Targeting Today
Enter behavioral targeting. This form of targeting doesn't care who a potential customer it - instead, it focuses directly on what a customer is doing at a particular time. The internet is ideal for this sort of targeted advertising and marketing, since online users can be tracked "on the fly." Using cookies and other technology, you can see that a customer has checked out four mortgage calculators in the past week. If you are selling mortgages, that can be a great indication that the customer may be in need of your product soon and is therefore ripe for a marketing message from you. Search activity, pathway data, click streams, submission activity and conversion studies have been used for some time to track user behavior in order to provide better options for advertisers.
Behavioral Targeting Tomorrow
Online behavioral targeting has an exciting future ahead of it. Microsoft and other companies already have behavioral targeting on its contextual ad systems and are putting money and effort into making those systems as involved as possible. Whereas before advertisers could target their car ads to search engine pages where users searched for "cars," companies are now trying to differentiate between high-end car buyers and bargain hunters in order to better target ads and to make them more relevant for customers.
The other major change will be added psychology. The trick is to determine how to evaluate customer information on the fly. If someone visits a fast food web site, a car web site and a travel web site, what are they really looking to buy immediately? Getting these types of answers will help future advertisers more perfectly match ads with potential customers and will allow targeted ads to be generated more quickly, before a customer loses interest. Another option might be to hybridize behavioral targeting with past purchasing history and other customer information to create a more complete look at each customer. The sky is really the limit when it comes to behavioral targeting. |
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