Articles in The 'behavioral-targeting' Tag

Remarketing Campaigns: It’s All About Transparency and Messaging

by Gerard Tollefsen

Remarketing or behavioral targeting campaigns can be a tricky proposition for many businesses.  It’s important to reach out to current customers and equally as important to reach out to people who visit your site whether they complete a desired conversion or not.  With privacy issues and Facebook making headlines everyday, the last thing you want to do is come across like “Big Brother” watching your site visitor’s every move.  However, you can incorporate some basic fundamentals into a remarketing campaign to overcome any stigmatism that comes along with tracking visitor engagement.

First and foremost, be sure to have a privacy policy statement on your website clearly stating you are using a cookie based tracking system.  Google, for example, explains how to address this in their AdWords Help section as follows:

If you’re using the remarketing feature, you must have an appropriate description of your use of remarketing in online advertising. The description must be included in the privacy policies of all sites that include the remarketing tag.

The privacy policies should include the following information:

• Third party vendors, including Google, show your ads on sites on the internet.
• Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to your website.
• Users may opt out of Google’s use of cookies by visiting the Google advertising opt-out page. (Alternatively you can point users to opt out of a third party vendor’s use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt out page.)

Once you have that in place, the success of your remarketing campaign comes down to two basic factors: identify who you want to remarket to and the message you want to convey.  This is very important because the audience you are targeting and the message you display in your ads must be cohesive.  For example, if you are remarketing to people who visited your site, but abandoned the shopping cart, the remarketing ad copy should have a clear call to action on why it is beneficial to re-visit your website and complete their purchase.  Providing an incentive, a free giveaway or special discount code is a great way to convince that visitor they made the right decision by visiting your site in the first place and that you want their business.  If you are targeting people who visited your About Us section, ad copy detailing the strengths of your company, how long you have been in business or awards you have won can be powerful remarketing messages. 

Mapping out your strategy is important to the success of your marketing plan.  When running a remarketing campaign you must be clear with your privacy policy, you need to know your audience and create a message geared specifically to them.

Blending Targeting

by Nydia Davis

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.