Behavioral Targeting For Advertising Banners

What is Behavioral Targeting?

Behavioral targeting is the practice of showing consumers banner ads for things that they have proven they are interested in. For example, let’s say that a consumer has recently been looking at and comparing computers online. If you sell computers, you want your banner ad to be visible to them. In addition, if a consumer has recently bought a computer, then you want to expose them to your banner ad relating to their recent purchase such as banner ads for printers, a mouse, speakers, etc. 

How Do You Know What a Consumer is Interested in?

The answer to this question is all about a little thing called cookies. The cookies on a person’s browser record what web sites that person views, what they purchase, what they search for online and what banner ads they click through on. As you can imagine this provides a lot of information about a potential consumer that can be very useful in advertising banner campaigns.

Working with Ad Networks for Behavioral Targeting

The key to using behavioral targeting to make your online banner ad successful is to make sure that you are working with an ad network that observes many consumers behavior and an ad network that can place your custom web banner across many networks. It is also important to determine how the ad network you are working with defines your target audience. For example if you want to target potential customers that conduct computer related searches then you need to see how your ad network defines that consumer. Not all ad networks define consumers in the same way.

Will Behavioral Targeting Help Your Advertising Banner Campaign?

In short, absolutely. Many consumers like to see advertisements for things that they actually have an interest in, making them much more likely to click through to your web site. However, just because behavioral targeting will improve your banner ad campaign, it does not mean that you should ignore all other forms of targeting. Keep in mind that behavioral targeting is not a complete solution and it truly works best when combined with contextual, placement and demographic targeting for your advertising banner campaign