Skip to content

What is Contextual and Behavioral Targeting?

Contextual and behavioral targeting Contextual are among the terms that advertisers should grasp and understand exactly how they work. 

With the evolving technology, marketers are under a lot of pressure to make decisions that will boost the sales of their clients.

Understanding how all advertisement methods work helps in making informative decisions.

Defining contextual advertising

It’s essentially placing ads in the content that is relevant, instead of tracking the data on the website’s visitors.

For example, placing a designer cloth advert in a fashion blog.

How is contextual targeting done?

All Website URLs are categorized depending on their content with the help of a web crawler. 

The data about an URL is transferred in the form of a request to the ad server, every time a user engages with the website. 

The URL crawler matches the information collected on the ad server and finds campaigns that have similar data. 

What are the benefits of contextual targeting?

With the  General Data Protection Regulation of 2018, acquiring the user’s information is becoming very challenging. Contextual advertising allows you to promote your products without interfering with the user’s privacy. 

Contextual ads also complement a site and encourage web visitors to purchase the products. 

What is behavioural advertising?

This marketing method involves targeting the customers based on their browsing interests and their engagement with other online platforms. The behavior may include:

  • Search results
  • User’s history
  • Interaction with a website
  • Date of the last visit on a site
  • Pages, items/ads they’re clicking
  • Time spent on specific websites

What are the benefits of behavioral targeting?

It provides a chance to personalize an ad and elevating its relevance to the targeted audience.

It works in different ways by deciding on the psychographics, demographics, geolocations, etc. Subsequently, placing ads that are interesting to your web visitors, increasing the number of views in your advertisements.

Behavioral targeting also enables advertisers to track consumer behavior and activities on a website. Using this information, you can easily craft converting campaigns. 

By checking your web analytics, you can determine the success of each campaign and focus on the lucrative ones.

Types of behavioural targeting

Here are the two types of behavioral targeting.

1. Onsite

This focuses on the user’s behavior on a specific website for personalization purposes. An ad is placed based on the engagement of the user on a particular website, or any other information of the user on these pages.

For example, if you’re constantly visiting food blogs and reading content on French cuisine, and entering the area of your residence. You’ll get an ad if a French Cuisine Restaurant is opened in your area.

Since this kind of targeting results in placing relevant ads, the revenue is equally pleasing.

2. Networking 

For this approach, an advertiser uses IP addresses, device numbers, or cookies instead of using phone numbers and email addresses.

For instance, if a web visitor visits juvenile gaming sites, cartoon watching sites, and clicks on Beyblade or B-10 instead of Barbie, there is a high probability it’s a male kid. Therefore, you can display ads like kid’s snacks, video games, and clothing brands.

Contextual Advertising vs. Behavioral Advertising 

Although both of these advertising methods have different approaches, they’re both effective.

They both work towards placing ads that are relevant to web visitors. Since the ads are related to the content or interests of web users, ads get high conversion rates.