Behavioural targeting — what it is, why it’s important and how to do it

In an increasingly crowded market, it can be difficult for businesses to stand out with their products or services. Consumers are inundated with calls for their attention throughout their day on a variety of channels and they can become numb to different messages and advertising tactics.

Staying relevant to a customer’s needs and interests can ensure that marketers cut through the noise. One way to do this is with behavioural targeting, which allows marketing campaigns to provide solutions that ring true to consumers while being timely and important.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what behavioural targeting is and how marketers can apply this principle to their campaigns to improve their engagement and conversions. Specifically, you’ll learn:

• What behavioural targeting is
• Why behavioural targeting is important
• Types of behavioural targeting
• How to organise audiences for segmentation
• Behavioural targeting vs. contextual targeting
• How to get started with behavioural targeting

What is behavioural targeting?

Behavioural targeting is the practice of tracking consumer actions to identify the ads or campaigns that work best to create engagement and boost conversions. Marketers use behavioural data that tells them how people interact with their digital assets to craft follow-up campaigns that are more likely to perform effectively with that target segment.

To this end, marketing content can be personalised for website and mobile application users based on observable behaviour patterns. By personalising these messages, campaigns are likely to have a higher success rate than they would with generic suggestions or solutions.

When conducting behavioural targeting, marketers use real-time data and contact information to create profiles that predict and analyse user actions on a website or digital asset. This includes information such as purchase histories, web page visits and click-throughs, to name a few. When a user takes a specific action, marketers can serve up relevant content and personalised messaging to further engage with them and entice them to take the next step.

Behavioural targeting is all about action — the action the user takes on a given website or app and the personalised action the marketer triggers in response.

Why is behavioural targeting important?

Consider that personalised content sent at the right moment can increase the likelihood that the viewer will interact with it or choose to take a requested action. After all, marketers are targeting prospects who have already demonstrated an interest in a product or service by taking a specific action or series of actions on a website. Nurturing these leads with personalised messaging can help to convert them into customers. It can also create a more interesting and engaging experience for visitors and increase customer loyalty.

Behavioural targeting typically works because consumers are less responsive to broad strokes-type marketing that is general, impersonal or heavy handed. Instead, behavioural targeting allows marketers to deliver relevant, highly personalised content to potential consumers. This resonates better with prospects and also encourages them to make purchase decisions.

Marketers can also benefit from behavioural targeting by making better decisions about how and where they’re directing their resources, ads and messaging. It gives marketers direct information about consumer behaviour and allows them to create campaigns in response rather than basing them on testing or customer journey hypotheses. This, in turn, saves money and resources for the marketer while also saving time and brand integrity with their prospects.

Behavioural targeting teaches companies about how their target customers perceive their brand and interact with their assets. Marketers can build on their target segmentation and buyer personas by using behavioural data to create contact profiles and develop content that is most likely to resonate with the reader and lead to engagement.

The result is a website and marketing experience that’s more personalised for visitors and can be expected to produce conversions at a higher rate. This ultimately leads to a better return on investment or ROI, for marketing campaigns with higher click-through rates and conversion rates.

Types of behavioural targeting

Behavioural targeting is a critical component in today’s digital marketing world to help grow audiences, retain interest and remain competitive. Marketers can take advantage of multiple different types of behavioural targeting to connect with their visitors.

Website engagement

Once the hard work of attracting visitors to a website is successful, marketers want to retain them and engage with them as much as possible so that they will take a desired action, such as making a purchase.

Behavioural targeting can allow marketers to personalise the user experience through assets like pop-up promotions, ads and links to related content. These should provide value to the consumer and be based on the products, services and information they’ve expressed an interest in.

Campaign engagement

Marketers can also analyse behaviour when it comes to their email campaigns to understand which users open, click or otherwise interact with messaging. This can be used to create follow-up communications based on different target segments and buyer personas with more targeting based on actions.

Marketers can further organise and segment their email recipients depending on how responsive they are to certain messages and the actions they take. Doing so can nurture active and responsive leads into taking additional action that can lead to a purchase decision.

Purchase behaviour

Behavioural targeting can also be used on existing customers. Customer marketing is a powerful tool that can expand customer lifetime value by further engaging with consumers who’ve already demonstrated an interest in specific products or services.

Marketers can follow up purchases with messaging about similar or related products depending on what visitors have added to their baskets or actually bought. This is a very common type of behavioural targeting, especially for companies with a large ecommerce presence.

How to organise audiences for segmentation

All of these methods require a level of segmentation that goes beyond the standard buyer persona. Marketers may start out with a target segment only to refine it further based on behavioural data. The more segmented the prospect pool is, the more likely a marketer will be able to personalise the information that is presented based on behavioural actions. And the more personalised, the higher the engagement that can be expected.

Marketers should also focus on the customer behaviours and prompts that matter most to their business. For example, mobile apps can be designed to trigger a push notification reminder to log in to the app after several days of inactivity. Or for a consumer with items in their basket, a reminder email to complete their purchase could do the trick to close the sale.

Automating these calls to action can also free up marketers to address other tasks where automation is less viable. Marketers tend to save time once these triggers are configured, freeing them up to work on new campaigns, content marketing or analysing results to refine ongoing efforts.

Behavioural targeting vs. contextual targeting

It’s important to understand what behavioural targeting isn’t rather than just what it is. Remember that this tactic focuses on real-time, personalised targeting based on consumer actions that can be tracked, measured and reported on via a website, mobile app or email marketing system.

Some marketers may confuse this with contextual targeting. Contextual targeting is the practice of displaying ads or supplemental content on digital assets based on the content that is already there. For example, a marketer might run a pop-up ad for a discount on a service to viewers who visit a service page. This is not behavioural targeting because the ad would be displayed regardless of a user’s actions on the page. Instead, it’s contextual because it’s serving up content within the same context as other digital content.

Contextual targeting is less effective because it’s not personalised based on a consumer’s actual behaviour patterns or interests. It can even be detrimental when it’s content that’s less relevant to the user and interrupts their viewing experience with extra noise or information.

However, marketers can use both behavioural and contextual targeting in tandem. For example, ads that are served up on a website (contextual) can be displayed only when they coincide with a user’s interests (behavioural).

How to get started with behavioural targeting

Behavioural targeting leverages user actions to further engage them on a website or other digital asset with the goal of increasing conversions. To do this, marketers need a solid tech stack they can rely on for metrics that can be used to further segment target audiences and direct the right content to the right people at the right time for maximum effectiveness. The result can be timely, personalised marketing content that people notice and act on, which drives sales.

When you’re ready to get started with behavioural targeting and need a personalised solution to power your marketing efforts, look no further than Adobe Target. Marketers can leverage this software to create customer journeys that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), personalisation and automation at scale.

With Adobe Target, you get AI-powered user experience testing, personalisation and automation at scale so you can find that one customer out of a million — and give them exactly what they want, when they want it.

Learn more about customer journeys with Adobe Target today.