What Is Behavioral Targeting?
Behavioral Targeting
Behavioral targeting is a marketing strategy that collects user data based on users’ behavior. This information is then used to provide better website experiences and strengthens your marketing and advertising campaigns
Unlike demographic targeting, which makes assumptions based on a user’s age, gender, and the like, behavioral targeting leverages users’ past actions to indicate their interests.
Behavioral targeting mines metrics like:
- Frequently visited pages
- Webpage Viewing times
- Clicks
- Web searches
- Transactions
- Purchase behaviors
- As well as, length of session
With behavioral targeting, you can customize your creatives and messaging to match prospects’ intent.
Hence, your visitors could think you are psychic.
What are the benefits of behavioral targeting?
There are three key benefits to implementing behavioral targeting into your ad server:
- Adding this feature could generate more revenue, as advertisers will pay more to reach their target audiences
- It offers a better user experience, as ads are based on known interests
- Also, it gives you feature parity with other ad digital platforms
For these reasons, we believe behavioral targeting is a must-have feature for your ad server, as it offers multiple marketing benefits: an opportunity for increased revenue, along with better experiences for your users and advertisers.
How Behavior Targeting Works?
Step 1: Gather Data
Technology is used to gather data, usually from multiple sources. This may include the use of tracking pixels or third-party cookies.
In fact, leveraging the data from your existing experimentation program is another way to glean insight from data.
Step 2: Segmentation
With segmentation, software places users in groups based on behaviors like interest and purchase habits.
Simply, you can create segments based on several elements, including:
- Language
- Location
- Pages visited
- Date since Last visited
- Goals
- Visit duration
- New Visitor vs. Returning Visitors
Step 3: Apply Data
Now, the fun part. You get to transform the information gathered into eye-catching creatives, engaging content, and high converting targeted digital ads campaigns.
Hence, it is critical in this phase to measure your efforts using qualitative and quantitative analytics tools.
Use behavioral targeting tactics to your advantage:
Leverage upselling & cross-selling
In fact, knowing what your customers love and how they interact with your business is a massively powerful tool to suggest additional products to them.
If your company has any ecommerce activities, then you’re likely already familiar with cross-selling and suggested products: techniques that are also powered by behavioral marketing.
Use behavioral email marketing campaigns
According to Smart Insights, email marketing still delivers impressive conversion rates when it comes to selling products and services. Basically, behavioral email marketing consists of sending targeted emails to users based on their past actions on a website (cart abandonment, pages visited, newsletter subscription, etc.).
Leverage Facebook, Google, and other retargeting services
Retargeting and remarketing are common tactics to target potential customers for behavioral targeting who’ve previously visited your website by showing them ads on other websites (like online publications, social networks, or even game sites).
In fact, there are several ad networks that support retargeting.
Among them, Facebook and Google are the most common options because they reach large audiences and provide accurate data and analysis on the generated sales. They also boast a lot of integrations with third-party data analysis tools.
Nowadays, the number of factors that tracked is impressive:
- Which pages have been visited?
- How long were the sessions?
- Which products were bought?
- What was the average order value?
- How many products were purchased?
- How long has it been since a visitor’s last session?
- Which customers have added a product to the cart and then abandoned it?
Once marketers have gathered enough behavioral data, they can proceed to create user segments based on behavioral traits and show them highly relevant digital ads.