New Behavioral Targeting Tools

When you do a search online, most people will go to either Google, Yahoo, or MSN for relevant information, however soon enough the search engines are going to be searching you. Searches are going to include obtaining a consumer’s online activity and frequently searched terms where that information will then be used to determine how close a consumer was to making a purchase on a particular product. The question’s that arise from this aspect of marketing are if marketers are going to pay for this information, if consumers feel that it will be an invasion of their privacy, and if search marketing will be able to absorb this new level of complexity.

Some search engines are already targeting certain demographics, geography, and day parts like MSN’s adCenter’ which focuses on targeting contextual ads. By spring they plan to have behavioral marketing in their mix. Google is planning on incorporating user profiles and activity history into content and ad targeting as well. Yahoo! is using their own product, Yahoo! Impulse, which allows for targeting of its displayed ads within content network based upon a users recent searches. Other companies are incorporating similar tools to their strategy as well to target customers more closely.

So with this new tool, marketers will be able to grasp whether their customer they were targeting was searching other locations before typing in one of their keywords per se. Basically then marketers will be buying ads based on people and their habits opposed to buying ads based on keywords and context. With this added knowledge to target day parts and geography, media buyers will most likely pay a percentage premium on top of what they are paying for their keyword price to make sure they are getting these additional layers of targeting.