Behavioral Targeting is a method of advertising used by online marketers to increase the effectiveness of their online marketing campaigns. Behavioral targeting allows marketers to deliver a relevant branded message to a specific target audience. The concept behind this marketing technique is to track an internet user’s behavior and then return the most relevant advertisement. If delivered properly, behavioral targeting can provide a medium for marketing online that yields a high click-through-rate and ultimately increase not only the conversion rate but also the number of conversions (sales).

Who Should Do Behavioral Targeting?
Typically behavioral targeting has been used by large companies and organizations to attempt to reach out to a greater potential audience, but more recently a fair amount of small companies are seeing great success from running behavioral targeted online campaigns. Behavioral targeting offers large and small businesses alike another avenue to reach their potential audience directly. The integration of technology with the science of understanding a user’s clickstream and search patterns has allowed publishing networks to offer advertisers the phenomenon of being able to serve an advertisement directly to a primed consumer.

What are the Benefits of Behavioral Targeting?
As with any online or offline marketing initiative, the end goal is to generate more conversions. When incorporating behavioral targeting as a marketing technique into your overall online marketing strategy a marketer can expect to experience three types of benefits: Existing Customer Retention: If behavioral targeting is integrated with an organization’s CRM (customer relationship management), the organization can expect to see conversions increase due to the direct traffic control behavioral targeting offers. Traditional methods of communicating with existing clients do not allow marketers to individualize marketing materials with the precision behavioral targeting can.

Brand Awareness: Large companies are more likely to initiate a behavioral targeted marketing campaign for reasons of brand awareness than small companies. Larger companies use this technique of marketing to get their name in front of their potential audience as much as possible. The end goal of these advertisements is not necessarily to drive the conversion that instant but yet to get the potential consumer to be aware of the company or organizations existence.

New Customer Acquisition: This benefit of behavioral targeting allows for the easiest ROI tracking. As with many marketing initiatives the objective of this approach is drive an immediate conversion from consumers who are already looking in your industry’s landscape but previously did not know your organization existed.

Who Offers Behavioral Targeting?
Throughout the past decade many companies have come and gone that claim to offer behavioral targeting marketing and only a few have survived the rigors of the online marketing industry.
We suggest checking out the following service offerings, if you are interested in starting a behavioral targeting marketing campaign:
• Adknowledge
• Tacoda
• Revenue Science

Important Tips When Behavioral Targeting
• Always be sure to have a defined objective at the beginning of the project
• Know your target audience • Understand the possible benefits from a behavioral targeting campaign
• Monitor the progress of your campaign to aid in making better decisions
• Ask yourself if this marketing technique is right for your business? If so, start slow and work your way to a more comprehensive campaign once you have proven ROI.