Behavioral Marketing-revisited

Off late I came across an article that had quite an informative discussion about behavioral marketing. The term seemed quite unfamiliar and I took some time to research about it. To my surprise, behavioral marketing is a domain of expertize for most online marketers and yet only few are familiar with the term. Wikipedia defines it as "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." The methodology is mostly used by online marketers and publishers who study user behavior, analyzes their web browsing behavior and collects data about their preferences which is then effectively utilized to cater them with advertisements pertaining to their interests.

Traditionally the behavioral marketing technique were used by mainly advertising networks who studied particular user behavior on the basis of sites he visit. For instance when a particular user visits a site, an id cookie is being stored in the hard drive of his computer which makes a note of his online surfing behavior. On the basis of that his specific user profile is being created and the information helps the advertising network to identify his preferences and helps them in their business decision. Some prominent providers of this service include Tribal Fusion, Audience Science, Burst Media and more.

Lets now shift our focus on some newer advertising models. Search Engines like Google, Yahoo! run their advertisement campaigns based on the keyphrase typed by an individual searcher. The Google Adwords use user search information to display targeted ads based on his need and preferences and also store your searches in their database for further reference. Thus the age of concept of behaviorial targetting is revisited; only with a more upgraded technology and yet with more sophistication.