Digital Media News

Behavioral targeting or behavioral advertising can be thought of as the process of selecting prospects based on what they actually do online. Such online activities can include search terms used, sites visited and general browsing habits. The technique of behavioral targeting delivers advertisements to audiences who are actively seeking your offering or have a history of visiting websites of a similar content or topic to your product or service. When you get a moment, check out another article written by Exact Drive about behavioral targeting entitled, “Is Behavioral Targeting the Best for Customers?”

Exact Drive offers a number of behavioral targeting categories to choose from. Below outlines the available behavioral targeting categories and the related behavioral targeting definition for each, followed by a supporting definition after each category. Remember, with behavioral targeting you are trying to accurately select or target prospects based on what they actually do online or have done online. Again, the technique of behavioral targeting delivers display ads to audiences who are actively seeking your offerings.

“Do Not Track” supporters listen up. I’ll admit it, I can be a bit self-centered sometimes, but I’m going go out on a limb here and suggest that so are most people. I’m not the first person to say it and I won’t be the last: people are very into themselves. We like to think that the world revolves around us. Perhaps it’s a biological thing? Maybe a feature that sets us apart from other organisms on the planet? Whatever it is, this idea of us being into ourselves shouldn’t be ignored, especially when discussing online advertising and the highly debatable topic of “Do Not Track”.

Moderation in almost anything in life is advised; in many cases it should be a requirement. I’m currently in Erkheim, Germany, a lovely town about 60 minutes west of Munich. Almost anyone I share this fact with is intrigued and tells me how lucky I am to be working in Europe. In many respects they are correct, except my travel schedule hasn’t had any moderation as I have visited five countries in the last nine days and have had way too many work meetings. As a result, the quality of my current experience is being degraded due to an overload of what should be more enjoyable pastimes.

The key is moderation. A lot of buzz and discussion is constantly going around the ad industry about data, including behavioral data, first-party data, third-party data, contextual data, retargeting age, demographic data, remarketing data, and so forth. There are too many conversations about wanting to utilize more and more data and media planners just blindly applying one data layer on top of each other without actually analyzing the quality, consequence, overall worth, and return on investment (ROI) of the different data layers.

The moment I even thought about writing this column I knew it would be criticized. Not because the column is offensive or insulting but because it challenges the usefulness, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness of a targeting methodology (behavioral targeting) that generates a lot of revenue and makes a lot of people a lot of money.