Behavioral Targeting:
Serving Your Customers Better

What is Behavioral Targeting?

"Behavioral targeting" is a technical sounding name for an old idea - offering your customers things they're interested in.  Any good shopkeeper will pay attention to his customers, and notice when they seem to express interest in some things and not others.  When he gets to know his customers, he will gently suggest things that they might be interested in.  Any business is more successful when it appeals more accurately to its customers' needs.

Behavioral targeting takes that age old idea and applies it to the web.  In this case the shopkeeper is software that has been integrated into your website to offer dynamic content components, based on what customers tell us they are interested in through interacting with the website.  If we see that they're interested in gizmos, we include information about gizmos on the pages that they visit.  If it's widgets that they want, we offer widgets.  You get the idea.

Content or Advertisements?

Historically, behavioral targeting has been most commonly applied through advertising engines and services.  Advertisers use it to target banner ads and other offers to customers based on their interest profiles.  This is widely used today, and continues to grow in popularity, but another more central application is emerging - behavioral targeting for core website content.  This creates websites that adapt themselves dynamically to their customers' interest profiles; what visitors to the site tell us they are interested in.  The degree of adaptation can be for small sections of pages, whole pages, look and feel, and even the navigational structure of the site, depending on the business need.

There are some key differences between targeting for advertising applications and targeting for core website content, such as:

• Core website content can often leverage identity information as well - see below
• The scope of behavior for core website content is focused to a particular site
• Advertising applications using ad services can track and leverage behavior across sites, but consistency of meta data can be difficult to enforce and will be applied inconsistently
• Ads tend to be a more limited set of content types
• Ads are expensive, so they tend to be much more intensively managed by business owners and media buyers
• Core website content applications require greater ease of use to encourage deeper adoption across enterprises

Clues to Your Customers' Interests

There are two broad areas of information that can be used as inputs - clues - to what your customers are interested in.  They are behavioral inputs and identity inputs.  Whenever possible, you should pay attention to both.

Behavioral inputs are based on how your customers interact with your website.  For each visitor to your website it asks "where is this customer clicking?" and "what are they searching for?".  Like a shopkeeper paying attention to his customers, behavioral inputs pay attention to each click from each visitor, and listens to what the customer is telling us through their behavior.

Identity inputs listen to things that the customer is telling us more directly about who they are, generally though products they purchase, forms they fill out, and accounts they create.  It tells us things like:

• Their location
• Their industry
• Relationship to your business
• Products they've purchased

Based on all the information we can gather about what each customer is interested in, behavioral targeting shapes your website to best meet their needs.  It includes things that this customer is interested in, and leaves out things that they're not.  Time with each customer is precious, and attention spans are getting shorter by the minute, so it's important to engage as directly as possible with every customer every time they visit.