What is Behavioral Targeting?
Behavioral targeting is a marketing and advertising method that uses knowledge about users’ behavior across the web to improve the success of their campaigns. This method relies on getting website visitor data and uses that information to serve relevant advertisements to people who have shown interest in the subject of the ad. This increases the effectiveness of ads, as people are more likely to buy something that solves their needs and in order to understand their needs, marketers employ behavioral targeting.
Websites use cookies to collect data on visitors to create profiles. The most common types of data that are collected are pages visited, amount of time, searches, and devices. Visitors can then be sorted into audience segments, which improves marketing targeting so that when a visitor returns to the website or visits another website which is a part of the same advertising network, they get ads tailored to their unique interest.
Big ad networks are more competitive in the field of behavioral ad targeting because they have more sites in their network and as such, can gather more data on visitors and improve audience segmentation.