Behavioral Ad Targeting

Since ad servers first became popular, the top ad serving companies have been competing with each other to get customers. If one ad server states that they have the newest and best technology available people might be more inclined to use them. Other ad serving companies will have promotions and sales to try and get more customers. With no strict rules for the companies, they will say and do whatever they need to in order to get as many paying customers as they possibly can.

Behavioral targeting is one of the newest marketing strategies out there on the internet and it has become one of the most popular ways for advertisers and ad serving companies to advertise or promote their advertisements. Most internet advertisers and marketers rave about how great advertising based on a user’s behavior can be but they often don’t tell you everything about it. This article is going to explain how behavioral advertising works and who should use it.

Real Life Example

How behavioral advertising works is that through internet data tracking services or ad servers, you obtain information about what specific websites and webpages certain people have viewed and what advertisements they have clicked on. All of this information is collected anonymously to make sure that people’s privacy is protected while they collect their data.

For example, let’s say that you are running an advertising campaign and the product that you are running the campaign for is a special kind of blender that you invented. Before you begin your campaign, you want to make sure that you are going to be advertising to the right people in the right places. You can view what people in what locations have visited kitchen appliances websites and cooking websites in a certain time period and you can even view what kind of products they were looking at. You can choose to advertise to certain groups of people based on the types of websites and webpages that they view when they are on the internet. This allows you to only advertise to the people who are most likely to buy your product.

One of the great things about the data and statistics that you analyze during this kind of advertising is the data and statistics are given to you live. Data is being collected nonstop for twenty-four hours a day and it is always available for you as soon as it is collected. This allows you to find the best times to have your advertisements on display to the potential customers in your target market.

How to Manage Your Ad Inventory

For those of you using ad servers so that you can use behavioral advertising, you are going to have many questions on how to manage your inventory. You may have hundreds or even thousands of ads and media items in your inventory and it is difficult to decide which specific things to use and how to use them.

One way to display many advertisements is to develop a personal system to decide where each ad gets placed. First, go into your inventory and decide how many of your best inventory items you are going to use in your campaign. Then take the top ten percent of your inventory that is going to be used and set it up for regular advertising that is not targeting people based on behavior. Set the other ninety percent of your inventory that you are using in this campaign to advertise based on user’s behavior. The reason that you want to separate your best from the behavioral advertising is that you want their content to be displayed everywhere because it is the best and the most likely to bring in people outside of your minimized target market.
How much is behavioral advertising worth to me?

This question cannot be answered because the answer will not be the same for any two people who ask the question. That is because what may be worth thousands or more to some people can be worth nothing or even be costing other people.

To find out how much behavioral advertising is worth to you, you are going to have to experiment with both types of advertising and find out which method is more effective and efficient for you. Look at your ads that are being placed throughout the web and not targeting viewers based on their past internet behavior. See how many clicks they are generating per day and how many of those clicks are leading to sales. Then look at your advertisements that are being placed in places based on certain behaviors and tendencies of the viewers. See how the number clicks per day and the number of sales per day compares to your other kind of advertisements. If behavioral advertising is costing you twice as much as the regular advertising than it should be selling at least twice as many products as the regular ads are. If it is not doing that, it is likely not worth it for you to use that kind of advertising.

For some website owners, behavioral advertising may make your business a fortune. For others it will be a useless tool that will not help your business. The only way to find out is to try it out for yourself and see how it turns out.

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By: Naor

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