Understanding your ideal customer’s behavior can lead to a high-level personalization of your website. Personalization, on the other hand, is key for creating relevant messages that deeply resonate with your audience.
But what strategies should you implement in your processes to learn more about your prospect’s behavior online?
Behavioral Targeting is a commonly used strategy that helps you get unique insights about your online visitors. It gives you unique data that helps you design your website and communication in a way that converts visitors into customers.
This article will uncover Behavioral Targeting strategy in marketing and talk about the best practices and examples you can implement to make your website more captivating for your audience.
What Is Behavioral Targeting?
Behavioral targeting refers to a sophisticated technique in marketing where advertisers use their audience’s online activities to display highly personalized content to them.
In other words, when your ideal customer avatar visits certain websites and clicks on certain buttons, behavioral targeting allows you to use this data to understand what types of messages and advertisements will resonate with them, giving you higher chances for conversion.
It is a widely known fact that marketing for companies is more effective when it’s personalized. On the other hand, consumers get more relevant ads while browsing on the internet, making their experience more tailored to their needs.
The main goal of the behavioral targeting strategy is to effectively find prospects based on their specific interests and drive quality traffic on the website to boost business growth.
Why Is Behavioral Targeting Important?
Implementing a behavioral targeting strategy into your processes can help you significantly improve the effectiveness of your campaigns and get better results from your efforts.
More specifically, it can help you:
- Improve the User Experience: by promoting relevant products to your prospects, you create a seamless user experience for them. This is simply because your content resonates with their needs, and feel more connected to the brand as a result.
- Grow Your Engagement: if you understand your potential customers’ interests and needs, there is a higher chance that they will start engaging with your brand more. Higher relevance always sparks more interest and brings better engagement, which is essential to marketing.
- Boost Conversion Rates: the logic is simple here – the more personalized your approach is, the higher your chances of converting your visitors into customers are. Offering relevant services always evokes emotions, resulting in higher conversion rates for your business.
- Get Better Insights: the data that the behavioral targeting approach brings gives you the ability to make more informed decisions and gain a deep understanding of your target audience. That way, it’s easier to come up with an accurate user persona and build a brand that resonates with an audience on the highest level.
Types of Behavioral Targeting
Generally, there are two main types of behavioral targeting. It is important to make distinctions between them and choose the one that fits your business strategy more.
Let’s have a look at each of them and see how they play out in real life:
On-Site Behavioral Targeting
Quite literally, on-site behavioral targeting refers to the activities that your online visitors do on a particular website or an app. You can use this data to understand their behaviors, improve the UX, and make the website more personalized based on what you learn.
More specifically, with this type of behavioral targeting, you can track how users experience your content, which products they view, what pages they go to first, how long they browse each page, what they click, and more.
Getting this kind of data will help you understand what type of content is relevant to your audience and design your website in a way that feels intuitive for your visitors, making them more likely to convert into customers.
Network Behavioral Targeting
Another type of behavioral targeting goes beyond a certain website – it helps you track your prospect’s actions on other websites and platforms they visit online. Oftentimes, this is possible through third-parties that offer these types of services.
Collecting and using this data will help you understand your ideal customer’s profile even better and customize your website in a way that is captivating for them, increasing the likelihood of converting them into customers.
Essentially, network behavioral targeting represents a great strategy to effectively scale your business and amplify growth.
However, there are lots of privacy regulations and frameworks in place that you must keep in mind when executing this strategy. Adapting to the user-centric data from GA4 and being transparent with your online visitors will help you easily navigate this landscape.
Behavioral Targeting vs Contextual Targeting: What Are the Key Differences?
Depending on the context and the nature of the business, both behavioral and contextual targeting strategies are widely used by marketers wanting to display ads to their audiences.
Let’s make clear distinctions between these two and define each one of them separately:
- Contextual Targeting is a marketing strategy where you put out ads that are strictly relevant to the contents of a particular page.
This approach doesn’t require any information about the online visitors, and it’s all based on the context and general content of the page it is displayed on – depending on specific topics and keywords that a webpage has.
When it comes to the relevancy of the ads, contextual targeting is still highly relevant to the users, but not as much as behavioral targeting since it doesn’t use personal data to decide which ads to show.
On the other hand, the contextual targeting approach doesn’t rely on third-parties, making it less challenging to comply with privacy requirements.
- Behavioral Targeting gives you the opportunity to display ads for individual online visitors based on their specific data. The main idea is that the ad should not necessarily be relevant to the webpage but to a particular user that is viewing it.
This is quite a widespread and effective approach because of its customizability. Collecting user data and tracking online behaviors made this strategy possible and easily accessible to marketers.
However, this strategy heavily relies on third-party data providers, and online users nowadays have the opportunity to block data collection tools, making the whole process of tracking and targeting harder.
Examples of Behavioral Targeting
Now that you understand the basics of behavioral targeting strategy let’s have a look at some examples of where this approach has proved to be extremely useful:
- Retargeting
Known as one of the most commonly used tactics, retargeting is an easy-to-approach and effective strategy to increase interest in your brand from website visitors.
The way it works is simple – you can install tracking pixels on your website, and every time someone visits you online, they see your ad on their social media feed as well, increasing the likelihood of them coming back to your website.
- Email Marketing
Personalization is everything when it comes to executing a successful email marketing campaign. The more personalized you are in your email messaging, the higher your chances of converting them are.
For example, sending regular product updates and including specific products that the user has already seen or sending out an email when the user abandons the cart session – these magical power moves are possible through the data you gather from behavioral targeting triggers.
- Purchase Behavior
This example is vital to any eCommerce store owner out there. Whenever your online visitor is browsing through different products, you can grab the opportunity and recommend them products that are more relevant to their needs.
You can determine the relevant products through the data you get from the behavioral targeting strategy, which will help you make more sales.
Start Implementing the Behavioral Targeting Strategy With PRNEWS.io
When it comes to implementing the behavioral targeting strategy, it is important to take steps to get considerable traffic to your website to receive data and gain unique insights about your visitors.
One of the most effective ways to do so is to get publicity from well-known international online publications in your field.
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