Behavioural targeting has been on the cards for many years with sites like Amazon and eBay you know when Amazon sends you emails suggesting books you may be interested in. This kind of targeting does have its sceptics; although I am personally not offended, it does have its drawbacks. They use past purchase data to predict what you may want to buy in the future. The problem is of course that if you purchased an Elvis Presley CD for your twice removed great uncle’s Jack’s 75^th birthday it doesn’t mean that you want to buy the whole Elvis collection.

Search engines are taking behavioral targeting to a whole new level. They use cookies to record search details of a user and tracks them through their web journey for the purpose of serving them relevant ads. The idea is that a consumer reveals a great deal about their purchase intent in their search query and therefore allows an advertiser to retarget them while they are browsing at a later date. Say for instance that I go on Yahoo search to search for “Elvis Presley’s Greatest Hits” and then sometime in the next 14 days go to Yahoo Music; it will attempt to serve me a display ad that is relevant to my previous Elvis search. Companies like AlmondNet facilitate the data collection and partner with search engines and publishers to track searchers and feed that data to the publishers ad servers. This also ties in very nicely with search personalisation that is being introduced by all the major search engines. Although post search advertising is still in its infancy it really does open up some great opportunities to convert customers beyond the search engine, particularly seeing that the ever rising cost per click and competition is eroding immediate return on investment. How search marketers embrace post search targeting remains to be seen but there is no doubt that it will play a bigger part in future SEM strategies.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Search Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.