What is Behavioral Targeting in Native Advertising?

The most common way of specifying a target audience for your campaign is filtering users out based on their demographic (i.e. age, gender, location, ethnicity, etc.). However, there’s another efficient audience segmentation method that’s proving to be much more versatile and accurate, and that’s behavioral targeting.

In behavioral targeting, instead of defining the characteristics of your preferred audience, you take advantage of each individual’s previous online behavior and interactions with your website or app to show them tailored messages relevant to their interests. The way users surf the Internet and what they read, watch, search for, and click on tell advertisers a lot about what they might be interested in both at present and in the long-term. All these data combined help create dynamic behavioral profiles for each user that’s constantly updated and customized. Advertisers could then adjust their campaign’s targeting so that ads are shown to the people with matching behavioral profiles. Let’s elaborate with an example.

Facebook Ads has one of the most powerful and sophisticated advertising platforms right now. As the most popular social network in the world, Facebook knows a lot about its users, and have gathered an enormous amount of first-party and third-party data throughout the years. When choosing target audience on Facebook Ads Manager, you have the option to filter targets based on their interests and behaviors. For example, if you have an e-commerce business that sells camping tools and accessories, you can pick people who are interested in “Camping” and “Adventure travel”.

As you would expect, behavioral targeting is only possible thanks to complex and powerful automated system and algorithms that are capable of accumulating and analyzing users’ online behavior to discover patterns and filter out irrelevant data. Behavioral targeting is similar to retargeting in terms of utilizing users’ previous activity data to show relevant ads to them. However, it’s much broader than retargeting and users much more data than just website visits.

A large part of native advertising best practices is dedicated to having the smallest possible impact on the user experience and not looking, sounding, and feeling like marketing sales pitches. That’s part of the de facto native advertising definition. Showing relevant and helpful ads to users is an inseparable part of the journey to that goal. Thanks to behavioral targeting, narrowing down your audience to people who will actually find your native ad relevant and aligned with their interest is much easier and effective. Remember that behavioral targeting is just a feature like tons of other powerful tools and features that digital advertising platforms provide. It dramatically increases your options when choosing the audience for your campaigns, so make sure to pick the right interests and behaviors based on your business type and campaign objectives. Taking advantage of a native ads spy tool for discovering the targeting properties of successful campaigns in your niche could be of great help.

Since this targeting method makes assumptions based on user’s actual behavior, there’s a higher chance they resonate with the content of your native ads and engage with it. This is a win-win scenario for both advertisers and ad recipients. Businesses could show their ads to people who are much more likely to convert and boost their return on investment (ROI). On the other hand, users get to see personalized, unobtrusive ads that might actually be useful or interesting to them.