Understanding Behavioural Targeting

If you’re a frequent user of major websites including Yahoo and Amazon, you may’ve noticed adverts from one company being displayed. This isn’t because that company has a huge marketing budget, it’s because of something called behavioural targeting.

What is Behavioural Targeting?

This is how Wikipedia define it:

Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual. Practitioners believe this helps them deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be interested.

In layman’s terms, behavioural targeting is a kind of online marketing not dissimilar to Adwords by Google in the sense that your advert will appear on multiple sites and, depending on your budget, your advert will appear on some major sites – with the potential of the adverts appearing on high-traffic sites such as AOL and Yahoo.

What’s different is the way that it works. To make this easy to understand, here’s a simple illustration (click to download PDF version):

(Click to download PDF, 2mb)

Conclusion

Behavioural targeting is a useful tool for companies hoping to make an impact to their users online with a technique that is useful, but not invasive.