Behavioral targeting

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Behavioral targeting or behavioural targeting is a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. Practitioners believe this helps them deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them.

Behavioral marketing can be used on its own or in conjunction with other forms of targeting based on factors like geography, demographics or the surrounding content.

Examples of behavioural targeting in advertising targeting systems include: AdLINK 360, Avail, Boomerang, Criteo, DoubleClick, nugg.ad, prudsys and WunderLoop. These targeting systems allow two main ways of using the technology:

firstly they allow advertisers \ site owners to display different creative to different people;

secondly they allow publishers to sell inventory against specific segments of their audiences to advertisers.

Contents 1 Onsite Behavioral targeting 2 Network Behavioral targeting 3 Concerns 4 Notes and References

[edit] Onsite Behavioral targeting

Behavioural targeting techniques may also be applied to content within a retail or other e-commerce website as a technique for increasing the relevance of product offers and promotions on a visitor by visitor basis. Again, behavioral data can be combined with demographic and past purchase history in order to produce a greater degree of granularity in the targeting.

Self-learning onsite behavioral targeting systems will monitor visitor response to site content and learn what is most likely to generate a desired conversion event. Some good content for each behavioral trait or pattern is often established using numerous simultaneous multivariate tests. Onsite behavioural targeting requires relatively high level of traffic before statistical confidence levels can be reached regarding the probability of a particular offer generating a conversion from a user with a set behavioural profile. Some providers have been able to do so by leveraging its large user base, such as Yahoo!. Some providers use a rules based approach, allowing administrators to set the content and offers shown to those with particular traits.

Examples of onsite behavioural targeting systems include: Valtira, Kefta, Maxymiser, Netmining, prudsys and Touch Clarity. Yahoo! Inc. has been offering onsite behavioural targeting for many years as well.

[edit] Network Behavioral targeting

Advertising Networks use behavioural targeting in a different way to individual sites. Since they serve many adverts across many different sites, they are able to build up a picture of the likely demographic makeup of internet users. An example would be a user seen on football sites, business sites and male fashion sites. A reasonable guess would be to assume the user is male. Demographic analyses of individual sites provided either internally (user surveys) or externally (Comscore \ netratings) allow the networks to sell audiences rather than sites.^[1] Although advertising networks used to sell this product, this was based on picking the sites where the audiences were. Behavioural targeting allows them to be slightly more specific about this.

This service is offered by (among others): Adlink, Adviva, AlmondNet, Blue Lithium, Tacoda, Burst, NebuAd, Phorm and Revenue Science.

[edit] Concerns

Many online users & advocacy groups are concerned about privacy issues around doing this type of targeting. This is a controversy that the behavioral targeting industry is trying to contain through education, advocacy & product constraints to keep all information non-personally identifiable or to use opt-in and permission from end-users (permission marketing). AOL created animated cartoons in 2008 to explain to its users that their past actions may determine the content of ads they see in the future.^[2]

[edit] Notes and References