Behavioral Marketing/Targeting And Search Engines!

"Behavioral Targeting is a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. The idea is to observe a user’s online behavior anonymously and then serve the most relevant advertisement based on their behavior. Theoretically, this helps advertisers deliver their online advertisement to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them."

In Behavioral marketing, adverts are shown to consumer based on their behavior on Internet, rather than by the content of pages they visit. For example if a person decide to buy a car he start visiting different sites that are dealing in car sales. Many pages are there on a site which have very generic info about cars for instance take example of a pages having info about car history or history of companies manufacturing car. If ads are shown on this page based on the content of that page they are useless to that person. Rather than ads of car prices or car selling websites get more attention by that person. Thus here comes Behavioral marketing, by which advertiser and marketers show ads to person based on his browsing history.

Benefits Of Behavioral Marketing
Imagine a user visits a site and does a search for a particular brand of vehicle that you sell. With behavioral marketing, your ads can follow the user around from site to site, increasing the likeliness of him or her clicking your ad. With behaviroal marketing, your ad apears based on content what the user is doing, instead of content od teh page, he is visiting. This results in great improvement in your conversion ratio.

Google has started using Behavioral targeting . All the services Google offering have an option to Personalize, which is basically for that purpose. Google is using this personalized data for Adwords Service. Google had filed two patents for that purpose some time ago in 2005. Here they are

1 = Determining ad targeting information and/or ad creative information using past search queries(LINK)

2 = Results based personalization of advertisements in a search engine(LINK)

Google is naming its Behavioral Marketing as INTENT-BASED cause of privacy issues. Google's ad feature uses referrer information rather than cookies to track user queries.

There was a great buzz in 2006 about Microsoft using Behavioral Targeting. Some time ago Microsoft acquires aQuantive(LINK) for $6 Billion for Behavioral Marketing purpose. aQuantive uses behavioral targeting for showing ads. You can have a little demo of behavioral targeting by using Microsoft AdCenter Lab(LINK) . This make s confirm Microsoft is already in the game or will be in near future.

Now Yahoo moving in this game by recently acquiring ad network company BlueLithium(LINK). BlueLithium is the 5th largest ad network in the US and 2nd largest in the UK with 145 million unique visitors each month. BlueLithium use Behavioral Marketing for showing ads. Its targeting capabilities based on

• Behavioral targeting
• Demographic targeting
• Contextual targeting (choose from 16 content channels)
• Geo targeting
• Zip code
• Day part
• Operating system type

Here is an interesting demo of How Behavioral targeting companies shows ads.. (LINK)

Negative Aspect Of Behavioral Marketing
It obviously raises the privacy concern. Your whole data is open to such companies which can be used negatively too. Example of such thing is release of private data of a user by AOL in 2006. So what do YOU think of this issue? Is it OK or ....