How Targeting Works In Online Advertisements

Online advertising is one of the surest ways to reach new audiences for your product or site. Its importance is underlined by the fact that Google's online advertising product, Google AdWords, is its biggest revenue earner, bringing in $28 in revenues in the year 2010. More and more companies are using online advertising solutions to reach consumers; these consumers can be from their city, or from around the world. To reach the right type of consumers, companies are doing online ad targeting.

Behavioral and Contextual Targeting

The two fundamental methods of targeting advertisements are behavioral and contextual targeting. In contextual targeting, the ad displayed to the visitor is related to the site's content. Such an ad is targeted because a visitor who reads about a particular subject is more likely to be interested in buying a product that is related to the given subject.

Behavioral online ad targeting works by observing the browsing behavior of the visitors, and showing them ads that are related to their browsing or behavioral history. Behavioral advertising is more advanced than contextual advertising, and has better results. This is because it depends on more data points about the individual.

Targeting Ads Using Google AdWords

Google AdWords is the largest online Advertising solution, and offers a lot of innovative methods of online ad targeting. Apart from contextual targeting, Google AdWords offers the advertiser the option to exclude sets of IP's from its audience profile. This allows the advertiser to target visitors from specific locations, or to exclude visitors from other locations. AdWords also allows the advertiser to target visitors based on their language.

Another innovation from AdWords is the ability to target visitors to specific sections of sites. This works because many sites have diverse sections that have content on different topics. For example, cnn.com has sections on News, Sports and Entertainment. You may want to target your ads to visitors who visit the Sports section, but not to the visitors of the other sections. Google AdWords will allow you to specify the sections of the sites for which you want to include or exclude your ads.

Targeted Advertising Concerns and Solutions

Many consumers have privacy concerns regarding behavioral advertising. Such concerns have been expressed by in consumer surveys and consumer groups. In many instances, such as the contextual ads that are seen in Gmail inbox, online ad targeting is done with the consent and awareness of the consumer. However, in other instances, consumers are not aware of the targeted nature of the advertising that they view. Informing the consumer about their privacy policies should help a lot in reducing the consumer concerns regarding targeted advertising. By allaying these concerns, and by implementing a strong online ad targeting system, an advertiser can get very enthusiastic response from their online advertising campaigns.


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