Behavioral Ad Targeting Growing In Scope

With MSN debuting a new behavioral targeting advertising platform, more advertisers are wondering how behavioral targeting can help their own sales rates.

by Kristina Knight

In the simplest form, behavioral targeting tracks customer preferences so that advertisers reach the most potential clients in the easiest way.

In MSN’s platform, customers will be divided into 18 different segments based on their online search habits and web pages visited. Based on the segment, customers are served up display ads that are relevant to their interests.

For example, a cheap airfare advertiser wants to maximize conversion rates for their flights. MSN would show potential clients ads for that Microsoft site to members identified from the segment. It would also show other ads on the same page for other behavioral segments.

Segments include parents, mobile users, gamers and movie watchers. For larger segments like travelers, the scope is broken down into hotels, cruises, airfare tickets and rental cars. A segment like automotive would be broken into sub-segments such as sports cars, luxury cars, SUVs, trucks, etc.

Yahoo has been utilizing behavioral targeting for several years and now has new targeting capabilities with more options, and later this year the company will introduce the Panama search ad platform. So far, Google is out of the behavioral targeting search hunt, but the company has several patents pending, which indicates they may be entering the BT fray soon.