Behavioral Targeting Steps Onto the Playing Field

As behavioral targeting becomes more and more prominent in the playing field, advertisers should be aware of the types of targeting that has been successful. There are two main types of behavioral targeting that companies can benefit from, audience targeting and online inventory targeting or retargeting. It’s been found that audience targeting works well for businesses that have online inventory with short supply and inflated prices such as financial or automotive categories. Retargeting has been found to work well for businesses who transact or sell online such as wireless providers. Wireless providers can retarget themselves to identify their customers who have in the past purchased handsets, locate the customers as they make their way across a network and then upsell them with subscription services.

Behavioral Targeting can improve a brand marketer’s efficiency. Big sites leaped ahead in advertising by collecting huge online audiences, and seeing how many viewers they could get with one site buy. This however gave great pricing power to only a few players which lessens the efficiency of the buy because competitors fight for the same expensive positions, which in the end causes clutter. But by incorporating behavioral targeting into a business strategy, you can reach a highly desirable audience in less expensive and less competitive environments.

Until recently advertising has been supply-driven. Advertisers were handed an application and were told to figure out how to incorporate their marketing within its constraints. Today, advertising is becoming more and more demand-driven where marketing challenges are presented and the technology supplier has to customize a solution to solve the challenge.

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