Blending Targeting

Nydia Davis - August 31, 2009

When running a pay-per-click campaign, many advertisers have a specific demographic of customers they would like to reach. Selecting the appropriate demographic is not only easy but it allows you to broadcast your message to the exact audience you are trying to target. Many search engines such as Yahoo allow you to target your audience by age, location, even income level.

A blend of the basic targeting options can produce good quality traffic. Using targeting features in conjunction with a behaviorally targeted media buy could produce an enhanced volume of qualified traffic. Behavioral targeting uses information collected on a searchers web-browsing behavior. Some these behaviors include the pages they have visited and the previous searches they have made. A user’s online behavior is evaluated when displaying ads to that them.

It’s practical to believe that behavioral targeting can deliver your ads to the users who are most likely to be interested. The other forms of targeting include geography and demography (mainly age, gender, income level). Behavioral targeting can increase the impact of your ad messaging.

Yahoo recently introduced Yahoo! Retargeting in an effort to help advertisers allocate marketing dollars efficiently to their targeted audience, hence increasing the effectiveness of online advertising expenses. Yahoo! Retargeting is an online advertising platform that monitors prospects who have visited your site before and tries to bring them back by displaying your ads the next time the searcher is on a Yahoo network. This is an attempt to convert users into customers and customers into repeat buyers.

Yahoo is one of the first search engines to introduce a behavioral tool that can be used with their other targeting options within Yahoo Sponsored Search.  For more information about Yahoo’s other targeting options, read Enhancements to Yahoo’s Targeting Features.