Introduction to Behavioural Marketing | Online Advertising Guide

Behavioural marketing is a type of marketing strategy that focuses on the actions that a user takes when visiting your platforms, be it your website, email campaigns, ads or social media pages. By analysing the unique behaviour of your users, you are then able to paint a more complete picture of them and what they are really searching for when interacting with your brand.

Have you ever searched for something on the web, and then received an advert for something related to it a couple of days later? No, this isn’t a coincidence, it’s an example of behavioural marketing in action.???

How Does Behavioural Marketing Work?

Behavioural marketing is especially valuable as it allows you to target very specific groups of people and turn them into leads. In a world that is full of ads, popups and ways to generate customers, it isn’t always the best idea to run a campaign in the hope that someone?might?interact with it.?

Instead, behavioural marketing will take into account other aspects of the user’s behaviour, such as their browsing and search history, IP address and cookies. Information on what they are looking at, how long they spent looking at a product or whether they added anything to their basket is all collected and sent to the ad server. This information is then used to generate a clearer picture of who your customer is and what they are really looking for.

Behavioural Marketing vs Contextual Marketing

Where behavioural marketing targets specific users based on their online behaviour, contextual marketing will display an ad alongside content that is deemed to be relevant. An excellent example of this is if you were buying a new guitar, you may see ads at the side of your screen for guitar accessories or music lessons. Machine learning is used to ensure that the ad is relevant to the on-page content to maximise the conversion rate.?

Both behavioural marketing and contextual marketing are valuable forms of advertising as they are both used to put related ads in front of users at the right time. What’s more, they are both highly dynamic and will become better equipped at finding the right customers as they gather more information. Despite these similarities and the end goal being the same, behavioural and contextual marketing are very different in how they choose the right place for an ad.

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