Richard Vanderhurst Discusses Behavioral Targeting
Advertising techniques have been evolving alongside technological advancements. The traditional method is to invest a huge amount of money for ads to reach a specific portion of the population. However, most of these target audience are not interested with the product or service being marketed. Because of this problem, advertisers found ways to improve targeting techniques in such a way that ads would reach a more specified group. One of these techniques is contextual targeting which is the placing of ads within the context depending on the content with which it surrounds. For instance, an article in a magazine about weight loss has ads on diet pills or gym memberships placed along with the texts or at the end. This form of advertising supports the assumption that readers might be interested with products and services related to the article. Apart from contextual targeting, another method used is the demographic targeting. In this method, the age range of the target group is identified to distinguish the appropriate approach needed.
Richard Vanderhurst explains that although the two aforementioned targeting techniques are effective, a better way to reach a highly qualified lead on the internet is through behavioral targeting. This refers to the study of consumer behavior based on their web activities. This is done by tracking and recording how people behave without getting any personal information through the use of cookies. These are pieces of code that companies place on a user’s hard drive to track past search behaviors and surfing habits. They can track every search movement a user makes and can therefore gauge whether the potential customer will or will not avail of the product and/or services that was searched. In this process, the advertiser can hold back the ads if the potential customer is not yet ready to purchase or sign-up. Advertisers will only pay for exposure that will have a conversion result. Since divisions of audience groups are getting more and more fragmented, this method provides more specificity as that of the contextual way of targeting. This, in turn, constitutes to a higher conversion rate.
Behavioral targeting provides a pinpointed way to find potential customers. It lets you reach them when and where they are most likely to accomplish a certain goal conversion – be it to purchase, fill out forms, sign-up for a newsletter or other services. Apart from the pre-conversion advertisements that behavioral targeting provides, the said method also helps develop post-search ads which are ads that show up at the landing page of your site. In this page, visitors who click through your PPC ad are offered additional related products and services. This can also help create more traffic to your site.
