In online advertising there are different ways to target your main audience other than by being on relevant sites. In other words, you do not have to limit yourself to advertising on health sites simply because the product you are pushing is ‘Tylenol’. Two newer methods being used are Behavioral Targeting and Contextual Advertising.
Behavioral targeting is a technique whereby an online user’s behavior is anonymously monitored in order to later deliver the ad message in a more effective manner. Take for example a user who visits NFL.com and is hit with ads for sporting goods. If NFL.com is using behavioral targeting the user’s information would be anonymously recorded and tracked. Later on, the same user could be surfing through Moviefone.com and if Moviefone.com happens to fall under the network of sites affiliated with the NFL.com than this same user could potentially be hit again with ads selling sporting goods and the like. The advantage here is that the user has previously expressed interest in sports relevant material and therefore, in theory, the ad message has been siphoned to just those people who are the most likely to be influenced by them.
Contextual advertising is a similar concept. Contextual advertising is basically when advertisements are selected to be served by a program based on the content displayed on the webpage. The best example of this is Goggle’s Adsense program whereby the content of a webpage is indexed, usually in real-time, by an automated system which then works in conjunction with specific JavaScript code imbedded in the page to pull relevant advertisements from a pooled network of advertisers. For example, if a webpage gives a breakdown on new laptops hitting the market than the bots that index the page will pick up on specific keywords inside the text and deliver an ad message that is relevant to those keywords. Ultimately, you can have a situation where a user can be looking at laptop information while being hit with ad messages informing him/her of where they can go to buy the latest Gateway computers etc.
One main difference between behavior targeting and contextual advertising is timing. In contextual advertising one can be sure the user is being hit with the ad message at the same time in which he/she is looking at content that matches the ad. However, this is not always true with behavior targeting. With behavioral targeting effective ad delivering is highly dependent how qualified the network of affiliates is. Targeting the user while he/she might is in the right frame of mind is crucial.
Both of these methodologies have high potential to accurately reach your target audience. The most important thing to keep in mind is the qualifications of the network in which the specific campaign will run. No matter which method you use, remember that good advertising is about results an nothing more. Quality over quantity
Good information. I don’t especially like this “monitoring” but well, we are not living in an anonymous internet world anymore