What Are The Additional Behavioral Targeting Tips
Behavioral targeting may sound like the solution to all your advertising worries, bu few problems. By its nature, it cuts the number of potential customers who will se ment. This could mean that you’ll miss some segments of the market (like those w yet that they are interested in what you’re offering, but would be if you presented an ad to them.
For this reason, behavioral targeting shouldn’t be the only method you use to targe customers. Sure, it’s a method that will make your PPC campaigns more effective, may be all that you need to be sure that behavioral targeting is right for you. But it all cases. Take the time to research behavioral targeting abilities with whatever ven but don’t put all of your hope in it. For most people it works great, but not as a sta ing method. To be truly effective, you should use programs that leverage contextua demographic targeting as well.
You may also want to use other targeting methods because some households have one computer with multiple users. This can cause the wrong person to be served with the wrong ad. If you’re considering the average family, for example, you have two parents and maybe a teenager who are all using the same computer. Mom spends a lot of time online looking at recipes and household. tips to make the job of taking care of her family easier. Dad spends a lot of time looking at sports scores. And the teenager spends a lot of time downloading music.
When Dad goes to the computer to look up scores, he may find an ad for cookware, because Mom was the last person to use the computer. Or the teen may be served an ad about a specific type of gourmet ingredients. The behavioral targeting is working properly, but because there are multiple users on the same computer, the user ends up seeing the wrong ad.
To some extent, the different profiles enabled by the Windows operating system will help with this. Cookies are stored according to user profile. But that’s making the assumption that each member of a family or each different computer user actually does use the profile. It’s not a foolproof system. And because it’s not, you should consider the possibility that this could skew your behavioral tar- geting effectiveness.
One more problem, and perhaps the most bothersome issue about behavioral targeting, is the pri- vacy issue. In today’s market, everyone is screaming about privacy. With the drastic rise in the num- ber of identity thefts, people are guarding their personal information more closely than in the past. And those people may take offense at having their online activities monitored in an attempt to pro- vide the best possible advertisements.
NOTE
To some, behavioral targeting sounds a bit like adware or spyware, both of which are methods of collecting information from users without their permission. And adware is used with the express intent of pushing unwanted advertisements out to users. Behavioral targeting is designed to better target your advertisements; however, users are aware that their movements are being tracked, and they agree to that tracking. Behavioral targeting also enables more than just push- ing relevant advertisements. It also allows an organization to see how it can serve users better accord- ing to their activities while they are on the organization’s web site.
Legislation can also make it more difficult to monitor people’s behaviors closely without their con- sent. To ensure that potential customers are not offended before the relationship even begins, many companies are including opt-in (or out) methods for being included in your marketing efforts (or not).
Study after study has found that your potential customers may be willing to let you track their move- ments on a couple of conditions. The first is that they know you’re tracking them. This requires put- ting out some kind of privacy notice that allows those potential users to decide not to allow you to track their movements. In the case of those who have no interest in being monitored, you’ll have to find some other way to serve them the right advertisements at the right time.
The second condition is that your potential customers want to see some kind of value from allowing you to access their personal information. This value could be that you provide higher quality infor- mation, better quality services, or lower prices (among other things). Whatever the value to yours potential customers, the higher it is the more likely your potential customers will be to participate in your efforts, and to let you use information about their movements on the Internet to serve them more targeted advertisements.
One of the most fortunate aspects of behavioral targeting is that you don’t need personal information for the targeting to be effective. Because all the tracking done with behavioral targeting is monitored by cookies, the only information that’s collected is movement behavior. What you’re doing is persuad- ing potential customers to participate in the collection of their web movements by offering them value for doing so.
