Behavioural Targeting Helps You talk to the People Most Receptive to Your Message
Date:
30 Nov 2010 Imagine if you knew which web surfers might be most interested in your product and if you could advertise directly to them without wasting money reaching people who aren't potential customers.
That is the promise of behavioural targeting, a form of targeted online advertising that uses information collected about a user's web-browsing behaviour (for example pages visited or searches conducted) to choose advertisements to display to him or her. For example, if you're an airline carrier, you might want to serve an ad about discounted flights to Cape Town to someone who is reading up on the city on a travel site and searching for air tickets. When this sort of behavioural data is matched with other targeting methods such as geo-targeting (serving ads to users in a certain country, region or even city) and demographic targeting, it becomes an especially powerful way of reaching users with relevant ads.
The way behavioural targeting works is by leveraging the intelligence that ad networks have about the way that users are behaving across the websites in their networks. Ad networks may use cookies to track users' preferences and behaviours, such as which links they click on, the terms they search for and the contents of their online shopping carts. The ad network can use analytics tools to identify consumers' interests from their behaviour, and then match them with relevant advertisers.
Behavioural targeting isn't a new technology - it has been around for a number of years. The reason it hasn't been popular to date is that because most advertisers and agencies believed that the SA web environment and traffic volumes were too small to support effective behavioural marketing.
The concept works best where there is a big pool of users and websites. However, the growing number of websites and users in South Africa is making the concept increasingly viable for local marketers.
The benefits for publishers are easy to understand: behavioural targeting data can allow them to sell inventory at a slight premium. This is especially helpful for the less popular placements, a few links away from the home page. It's a great way of monetising display placements that might otherwise be ignored by the market.
The benefit for the advertiser is simple: more click throughs, more conversions and better ROI. That's particularly valuable in a market where the prime, high-traffic online advertising space on the large portals is expensive and is quickly snapped up by advertisers with bigger budgets. You can talk to niche audiences in a cost-effective manner, despite the slight premium you may be paying over standard or contextual ads.
However, the number one drawback of behavioural targeting is that it has an effect on reducing reach. It may be effective to target ads to a motivated audience, but a lot of potential prospects do not demonstrate an interest through past behavior. Some users never learn about new products unless they are advertised. So advertisers could be missing a lot of sales opportunities.
Of course, behavioural advertising is still in its infancy in South Africa, where there are few powerful ad networks to buy space from. But many of the international networks are selling placements that reach South African users across their networks.
This market can be expected to grow significantly in the years ahead as premium ad space becomes more pricy and targeting technologies mature. Now is a good time to start experimenting with behavioural targeting to understand the value it has for your brand.
