Return to Recognizing Your Visitors
If you want to get all nitpicky about it, contextual advertising is behavioral targeting at its most basic level. That is, if you're selling minivans, a contextual campaign would rely on the self-selecting nature of the internet to reach interested people who surf to pages that contain content having to do with minivans. The web behavior of surfing through, say, an automotive review site down through the various categories past sports cars, sedans and SUVs and settling on minivan-related content is something that is very desirable to minivan advertisers. And getting them right as they're doing their background research on their next automotive purchase is icing on the cake, (duh).
The problem is, any automotive content publisher worth their salt already knows this, and specific types of automotive inventory sell quickly at high CPMs. You might have to commit to this inventory at prices well above plan averages, for a specific length of time, and at the de facto upfronts within the automotive sector.
We can do better. Automotive is one of the categories where smart behavioral targeting is a must if auto manufacturers and dealers want to put together cost-effective campaigns to drive qualified traffic into dealerships and sell cars. Among the first behavioral targeting tactics suggested by portal sites and networks was the concept of "inside outing" inventory. In other words, visitors to automotive content would be tagged such that advertisers could reach them later, when they might be doing something else. This targeted but out-of-context inventory could be purchased at prices that is something higher than that commanded by Run of Site or Run of Network, but something lower than in-context inventory. It's a simple concept, and I'd even consider it bush league at this point.
To take things to the next level, automotive advertisers might consider narrowing their field of vision a bit by applying recency and frequency algorithms to out-of-context inventory. There are a number of behavioral cues that automotive marketers can pick up on that can help qualify or disqualify someone with respect to eligibility to see a targeted ad. For instance, you likely wouldn't want to serve an ad to someone who was looking at prices for a Ford Escape six months ago, viewing dealer locators and pricing information repeatedly, especially if this behavior abruptly stopped some time ago. They've probably already made their purchase, and advertising to them now is probably a waste.
In the past, I've also written about behavioral predictors, the sometimes seemingly unrelated behaviors that can signal an entry into the market. For the automotive category, a high percentage of people who purchase new homes get a new car soon thereafter. (In my situation, my wife and I moved into a new house in December. The new Volvo Cross Country followed a couple short months later.) This concept isn't unique to the automotive category. Lots of marketers look for lifestyle changes and indicators that someone has moved from one stage in their life to the next. Many of these indicators can be reflected in web visitation and purchase behavior.
Let's say you're the agency for Home Depot. You might consider a campaign with wedding sites like The Knot. The logic here? An upcoming wedding usually means two people coming together and moving into a starter home. Many times, as those two people come together, they receive an influx of cash from relatives and friends to help get them started. Wouldn't Home Depot want to reach cash-rich potential customers who will likely soon have a need for their home improvement products? Home Depot could focus its ad weight behaviorally by targeting people whose wedding dates are coming up, as opposed to ones that are next year or undecided upon. Targeting the ads based on the wedding date submitted by engaged couples gets them closer to their target.
Contextual advertising is nice, but look to supplement your campaigns with behaviorally-targeted inventory that reaches the right audience when you don't have the benefit of contextual relevance.
Next: Is Search Behavioral Targeting?
