Roulette-Wheel Marketing is Dead – Use Behavioral Targeting Instead

Sometimes, traditional advertising feels so arbitrary. Intelligent, cautiously designed messaging can just sink into oblivion for no apparent reason. Stupid viewers! It’s normal to find this frustrating—especially when you’ve sunk some amount of time and money into your marketing efforts. Whatever the reason, if customers don’t connect with your ad in a way that sees them engaged, you’re unlikely to see that customer purchase anything on the basis of that ad.

Failures of this sort are often founded in a process that sees marketers creating ads that simply don’t address the viewer’s interests or desires.

And sometimes, they will even result from merely reaching out to the wrong audience. Now, here in the 21st Century, random marketing is outdated. This is especially true on the internet. Random marketing is a terrible waste of valuable resources, and with the modern availability of data, you can learn specific things about your audience instead of doing a bunch of guesswork.  

Behavioral Targeting in a Nutshell

In marketing, behavioral targeting is a way to apply web user information to the strengthening of an ad campaign. This involves gathering data from some series of sources about a potential customer’s browsing habits and personal shopping trends. Info of this kind will help you create relevant ads that are properly based on a user’s habits and interests, and these ads can be displayed in a visitor’s web browser.

The chief reason behind behavioral targeting is to deliver ads to any target markets that have shown plenty of interest.

Doing this means compiling purchase histories, Google searches, oft-visited sites, and other key info to build a complete user profile. This will indicate what your audience typically wants, what they tend to avoid, and what they like to purchase. These data points help you form ads that align with a consumer’s preferences without exposing them to messages they’d find unappealing.

How Behavioral Targeting Advertising Works (in 4 Steps)

How does behavioral targeting create such personalized ad experiences? Well, it has to do with tracking user behaviors online—using data, of course—and collecting bits of data from those recorded behaviors. Those bits are known as “cookies.” Let’s cover the 4-step process beginning with cookies and ending with the sharing of relevant information.

#1 Cookies Get Collected

When a user visits a new website or creates an account on that site, a cookie is acquired and remains on that computer where it is stored either on a local memory drive (temporarily—it’s deleted after the browser is closed out) or on the computer’s hard drive.

#2 A User Profile is Created

While cookies get collected and stored via clicks on ads, new page visits, or some amount of time spent engaging with certain content or similar data, a profile of behavioral patterns—related to shopping and search habits—will gradually accumulate.

#3 Designated Groups of Consumers

With patterns and profiles built, your company can divide users into discrete target market groups. With these distinctions, websites focusing on behavioral targeting can learn all about the purchasing habits, personal trends, interests, and preferences of these groups’ members.

#4 Relevant Information is Shared with Viewers

Now, instead of getting a bunch of annoying, random ads as they reconnect to the website, consumers can enjoy a bevy of personalized ads and other custom content drawing directly from their own prior online behavior. In order for this process to be successful, you generally need a powerful tool or platform for collecting certain data (like RAEK!)