This is a summary of the article by Anca Micu, called How Did This Ad Get in my Browser? A Theoretical Examination of Online Targeting and Segmentation Practices as they Relate to Media Planning on the Internet. You can read the original behavioral targeting article here: How Did This Ad Get in my Browser?

People who wish to communicate their market use targeting to have more accurate message deliveries and not waste any coverage towards audiences which are not interested in buying their products anyway. These people, therefore, need to have a considerable amount of knowledge regarding their audiences.

Planning for an Effective Medium

One strategy that needs to be implemented knows what kind of tools they need to implement for a certain group of people that are highly likely to purchase their products or services. There are a lot of things to consider here, such as the frequency of using a tool, or vehicle, towards a certain targeted audience, or the budget that largely determines which tools to use and how often they are used in the first place.

As time goes by, more and more companies are using the internet as an integral part of their marketing media strategy. The way they use the internet as a marketing medium is largely similar to what Bergen, et al (2003) calls as directed towards “customer space”. This simply means that the focus of internet marketing is towards the customers. Specifically, the full realization of internet marketing as an effective tool is upheld when the following strategies are incorporated.

3 Key Strategies for Customer Space Internet Marketing

The first key strategy is to only target the segments which are profitable. The second strategy is to use the brand value leverage to its full maximum. Finally, the third strategy is to give the impression that the brand is highly relevant to the customer’s life, through awareness and finding ways to build a solid relationship with your customers.

As an example, consider the contrasting strategies between Pantene and American Airlines. Pantene advertised ‘6 signs of healthy hair’ online through polls in which 2.5 million people responded, while American Airlines used large format and rich media ads containing customer testimonials, directed towards a specific group of business travelers. The latter is highly specified and aimed at a more interested audience than that of Pantene’s audience.

Simplified CPM Scheme for New Media Planning

Cannon (2001) proposed a simplified scheme for effective evaluation of alternative media vehicles. Although this evaluation scheme is a general scheme for alternative vehicles, it can be seen that it fits the internet media vehicle significantly. In this scheme, the interplaying variables are first, cost of distributing the message, second, the targeted audience, and third, exposure effectiveness.

For internet marketing, the first interplaying variable, message distribution cost, can be the cost of maintaining a website for a particular brand, as well as buying the Internet media. The second variable, or targeted audience, refers to the users who visit the web site of the brand. The third variable, or the effectiveness of web exposure, is the measure of whether the users who visit the website will respond to the advertisements they will see.

Choosing the Right Audience

How do you choose the right audience for your brand? Several methods are introduced by several people. For example, Bhat, Bevans and Sengupta (2002) introduced an evaluation of the activity of web users so that advertising will be enhanced. Their method is composed of five metrics. The first one is Exposure evaluation. Second is Stickiness evaluation. Third is Content Usefulness evaluation. Fourth is Co-marketing Success evaluation, and fifth is Targeting Efficiency evaluation.

The same group also introduces three metrics to measure the effectiveness of audience targeting. The first measure is called Composition. The second is global geographic overview. Finally, the third is observed profiling. Composition is a metric which outputs the kind of demographics or groups of users that respond to an ad, and gets the percentage of those groups. Global geographic overview is done by checking the domain of a user’s IP address, and observer profiling uses cookies to track the behavior of a user.

In 2007, it became clear that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft prioritize advertising after they each purchased online advertising companies. The search engine is an advertising platform, generating traffic through the search function. This is the summary of an article by Theo Rhöle, which discusses the mediating role of search engines between user and advertiser. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Desperately seeking the consumer..

Why search engine marketing is successful

Search engine marketing is successful because it doesn’t have the problems of traditional advertising. This includes poor consumer models, crudely based on environment or lifestyle, among others. Online searches are stored and that data determines the ads you will see, and respond to. This method is cheaper, meaning better ROI (return of investment). Another problem is consumer tendency to block out ads. We know this in television, and in traditional online ads, pop up blockers is very popular. Search engine marketing capitalizes on the popularity of the searching service to make targeted advertising. The consumers will sense an instant connection to the advertisers.

Brief history of search engine marketing

Search engine marketing probably started with banner advertising in 1994, where advertisers pay on a CPM (cost-per-mile) basis. This didn’t work because consumers don’t stay long in a website. Ultimately, they are more interested in the search results. This is followed by contextual advertising, first introduced by GoTo.com in 1998. Search results were auctioned to advertisers and they are made to pay on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis. With this method, expensive demographic research for advertising is avoided and a direct communication between consumer-advertiser is available. However, this method is inclined more to the favor of the advertisers than the consumers.

Behavioral targeting

This is followed by behavioral targeting; a more complicated process involving several methods to determine when a user is most-likely to respond to advertisements. Large networks and portals are used for this method since a lot of data is needed. For example, Yahoo’s Papadopolous has the power to accurately see user searches, ad clicks and sites visited; high quality data exploitation for commercial purposes. However, behavioral targeting is limited by the network’s reach. Google, Yahoo!, etc. all have limitations in this respect, but personalization of search takes care of this problem.

First of all, search relevance is not improving; people are still searching with a couple of terms with unclear implications. This and the data to be indexed is increasing. Personalization stores personal data for a long time and associating it into the search process. Furthermore, it uses three steps to improve relevance; user data collection method, profile storage and personalization method.

Three steps to improve search relevance

First is user data collection. User data collection is personalized by examining a user’s behavior to spot their interests. Implicit inference can be done by analyzing how user clicks the result list, among other methods. Second is, profile storage. Profile storage allows data to be used in various search processes. Storage can be on the side of the client or user. It can also be stored adaptively or statically; adaptively means the data can change with respect to changes in user preference. Data will then be used in the search process with a personalization method. It can be done by modification of search query or results re-ranking through the user’s personal profile. Third is personalization methods. Personalization methods are not standardized. However, they have already been implemented in social searches and recommender systems.

Use of personalization

Personalization has been used in groups through collective relevance feedback. These are called social search. One example are the Swickis which allow users to search around a certain subject area where one sets the parameters or query expansions. Furthermore, Swickis get feedback from users by voting for or against shown results. The Swicki user also has control over the displayed advertisements.  Swickis allow for more interactivity and transparency between users and advertisers, treating users as community members and not anonymous searchers. There is more democracy, but more importantly, the bond between user and advertiser is tightened.

Recommender systems use user online behavior to display recommendations and not information. An example is PersonalWeb. You can customize this webpage to your preferences, and it will proactively give out recommendations of new information sources that you can choose to accept or not. There is an implicit personal data collection based on user behavior and processed to send out its targeted personalized content and relevant advertising that gets better as more data accumulates. Other recommender systems even use the documents stored in your hard disks to base their recommendations from. It is possible that eventually, ads could even get around the psychological avoidance plans of users.

In fact, online marketing and online search has merged significantly and has shown great progress. Furthermore, personalized search has shown that user’s data autonomy is likely to become obsolete.

The success of online advertising can be attributed to the rapid growth of the number of internet users around the world. To date, over 1 billion people use the internet. Thus, online advertising will continue to grow.  The United States alone expects 18% growth while European growth is predicted to be 25%. By 2011, US online sales are expected to reach $1 trillion. This is the summary of an article by Gloria Boone, et al., discussing the importance of some forms of online advertising and its trends. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Emerging trends in online advertising

Online advertising through the years

In 1994, two immigration lawyers promoted their law firm through massive email advertising. Thousands of people were reached by this advertising campain, but critics were not happy about receiving unsolicited junk mail and attempted prohibition of online advertising. But now, e-mail is still a major commercial tool. Then, banner ads started in Hotwire during 1994. Users who clicked on that ad were directed to AT&T website. Banner ads follow a standard regulated by the interactive advertising bureau (IAB). Eventually banner ads were made with regard to web page metatags to increase their relevance. Then, the late 1990s saw the emergence of pop-ups; ads in a separate window, and are shown to be 13x more effective than banners.

By 1998, $1 billion was spent in online advertising. That time, banner ads were still the major ad formats. 1998 also saw the first year of sponsored searches and search marketing. Keywords are bidded to advertisers, who pay through pay-per-click (PPC) method. Rich media is another form of advertising. It uses multimedia (e.g. video, animation) for a branding experience supported by technologies such as Flash and Unicast. Rich media makes interactive and more audience-engaging ads. 2002 showcased the Dot.com bust had a 2 year shock on internet marketing. It fell from a 2001 $7.1 billion to $6 billion. But it recovered well in 2003, and online users still continued to increase.

Keyword advertising

Then, Google arrived with basic keyword advertising. The consumers flocked to Google, and so the ads followed. By 2003, Google used AdSense advertising, which uses contextual targeted ads. This means that if a user read an online article about babies, one would see ads about baby products, etc. Google then added other advertising opportunities, such as Google Base.

Behavioral targeting

Another online advertising method used by companies like Tacoda and Microsoft is behavioral targeting. This method lets companies know what services or products users are looking for, and surprises them by putting up relevant targeted ads at a later date and discrete website. This method claims 17% product lift.

Other popular advertising methods

Other advertising methods include in-game advertising, which is predicted to be a billion dollar industry, and social advertising, which emerged due to the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook. The popularity of blogs are also exploited, and companies such as Google AdSense and Reviewme are capitalizing. YouTube is a popular website bought by Google in 2006. In 2007 it was showing 70 million videos a day. This includes ads of popular products, which have the potential to be caught in viral advertising.

Online advertising issues

However, the emergence of online advertising is not without its issues. This includes corporate reputation. Print ads are quality controlled, whereas online ads are very susceptible to distortion and false information that is hard to counteract. Other issues included unauthorized product promotion or use and imitative sites. Web monitoring is taking care of these, partnered with legal recourse. Issues in e-mail advertising, including spam, unfortunately still continues to grow and evolve to trick spam detectors. Pop-up ads still exist despite the popularity of pop-up blockers. In-line advertising, which allows text in a website to be engaged by users, is problematic, as critics refute its crossing of the journalism-advertising divide. Mobile advertising is also disputed for being too intrusive; a threat to privacy.

Indeed, online advertising has grown from banner ads to rich media formats and other methods. Customers once resisted the old forms of online advertising, but advertisers lived on to use advanced technology to improve this medium.

Advertising was once a simple method dominated by huge and established companies. Media-buying and advertising agencies create print or TV ads and negotiate for space or airtime in TV or publications. However, digital advertising has brought home a new arena for advertising which is a lot more complicated, with more players and firms involved. This is the summary of an article written by Emily Steel, which looks at the history of online advertising and its unique characteristics. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Advertising’s Brave New World

While color TV was the largest advertisement innovation during the last 70 years, new firms are coming up to make ads for the Internet. There are internet sites for TV, magazines, etc, but majority of the internet is dominated by companies including Google and Yahoo. Internet marketing industry has grown a lot over the past few years, and has a considerable slice on the overall US advertising market. To capitalize on this, large companies, both from traditional advertising companies and online companies, bought or struck deals with major digital-ad companies.

Online advertising is precise

Online advertising is attractive because of its precision. At most, television ads are evaluated using a rough approximation before they are shown to a targeted audience. Criteria could for example be based on attributes such as gender; TV shows with mostly female audience are sent ads of products for females, or as the result of surveys. Most of the time, advertisers are never quite sure if their ads were successful in increasing sales. Online advertising, on the other hand, use the services of behavioral targeting companies such as Tacoda, to create targeted ads based on a consumer’s browsing habits. For example, if a person visits two car websites and then visits an unrelated site later, a car ad will appear on that site. The person will most likely respond to the website as can be seen by his previous browsing behavior.

Paid search

The most popular online advertising method, paid search, only requires advertisers to pay when a consumer clicks their ads. With this method, Yahoo and Google are the most popular, because they attract small businesses that can’t afford ad agencies. Furthermore, firms have helped these businesses make their own websites and apply search engine optimization so that these websites will show up at the top of the results lists on these search engines.

Other players in online advertising

More characters dominate other types of online advertising. Digital agencies design display ads and send them to websites through technology-motivated companies. A typical company buys ad space on a number of sites, lining up all that space with the help of ad networks such as AOL and Real Media. Ad-serving firms, such as DoubleClick and Atlas, also play a role; they deliver the online ads to the websites. Online advertising players also evaluate campaign effectiveness. Traditionally, this is done by audience surveys, but this is not as effective as what digital advertisers use. They use metrics based on number of ad clicks, time spent on ad, and what consumer does after seeing the ad. If something isn’t working, a simple click can help improve the process. This way, a lot of information is obtained regarding where advertisers put their money online.

The technology of advertising is vital because of its financial contributions to communication and information technology services and products. Advertising research is good for financial reasons and for coming up with an efficient system for advertisers and a great experience for consumers. This is the summary of an article written by Kurt Patridge and Bo Begole, which discusses three types of activity-based advertising and their contributions to the advertising challenges that lie in the future. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Activity-based Advertising..

Activity-based Advertising

Pervasive advertising includes out-of-home advertising and mobile advertising, and is characterized by dynamism and adaptability to physical situations. This method can be made more effective using contextual data analysis. This analysis is used in online behavioral targeting, where browsing targeted ads are made for users. These targeted ads are assessed from a user’s browsing behavior. This, combined with pervasive advertising, forms activity-based advertising. There are three types of activity-based advertising: Inferring Interest Categories, Adapting to Present Context, and Predicting Future Events.

Inferring Interest Categories

This is a strategy used to create targeted ads for a consumer based on his location. For example, if a person always goes to a Chinese restaurant, this technology infers that the person enjoys Chinese food. However, it’s also possible that the person just works there. Another problem is that GPS is not as accurate as it should be for this method, plus it works poorly indoors. If venue inference analysis can be improved, and a method of knowing if a person works in a specific location is created, then this technique could be generally sufficient.

Adapting to present context

This is based on the context of social groups. If you are in a group, this technology can detect that through proximity calculations to other people. In this case, a certain common topic is most likely to be discussed in this group. Furthermore, this situation allows for push advertising. This technology detects if this social group is in a conversation lull, which is interpreted as a signal by the user to allow ads to appear in his mobile phone. Timing and content is key to the sufficiency of this method.

Predicting Future Events

This is all about using contextual data to predict a consumer’s behavior based on his behavioral patterns, rendering some advertisements highly valued at the present moment. Specifically, transportation patterns have been studied in research to predict future actions.

Challenges

The challenges include the bidding process for advertisers. Advertisement bidding, specification and adjustments should be simple enough for advertisers. Another challenge is ad placement, which should still be quick and able to reach millions of users. Another challenge is privacy. Users should be able to control what personal data these technologies can get from them; only if users opt-in can these data be used for targeted advertising. Activity-based advertising is still not main stream, but portions of this technology are evident in some sectors of our society. In Britain, for example, the mobile carrier Blyk allows users to get free minutes and texting in exchange for accepting targeted ads. This paper predicts that 25 years from now, large amounts of physical behavior data will be used to send targeted information to consumers based on  their actions and not what they click.

This is the summary of the article written by Toubiana, et al., which proposes a method of online behavioral advertising which doesn’t compromise user privacy. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Adnostic..

One of the main problems of behavioral targeting is that it seems to be inherently conflicting with privacy. In this paper, a group of students propose an alternative around the dilemma. They created a system called Adnostic, and they discuss how the advertiser, publisher and ad-network can keep their advertising methods while accepting this proposed system as a compliment to their methods.

Goal of Adnostic

The goal of Adnostic is to allow ad-networks to serve the most significant ads without using private information from users. Ad-networks that use Adnostic are still able to provide targeted ads without knowing user clickstream (list of URLs user visited), behavioral profile (user’s interests inferred from clickstream), and ad impression history (ads displayed to the user). Adnostic’s advertising strategy is more limited compared to behavioral advertising, which is not as concerned with privacy. However, the success of this proposed method can be seen on its incentives to ad-networks who wish to support it.

Some incentives of using Adnostic

First incentive is for privacy-conscious publishers. Adnostic is a compliment to the existing behavioral targeting mechanism. This method creates a second option aside from the tracking-based system. That option is the privacy-preserving system. There are sites such as Alcoholics Anonymous, who want to preserve privacy and not allow targeted ads. However, with Adnostic, these types of websites will finally allow targeted ads. Second incentive is for small ad-networks. These ad-networks can’t see the user’s visited pages unless he/she visits sites connected to the ad-network. Small ad-networks can do better with Adnostic, which analyzes user behavior at the browser. Another incentive is that users that opt-out of ads will still receive targeted ads from Adnostic, which doesn’t track their actions. Furthermore, targeting will also be allowed in private browsing mode, because Adnostic doesn’t update user behavioral profile in this mode anyway.

Behavioral Profiling

The Adnostic system locally processes history database to know user’s interests. Each page in the history is classified using natural language processing heuristics. This method can also measure intent to purchase and influence. Furthermore, the problem in traditional behavioral targeting when it comes to computers with more than one user is eliminated. A user is distinguished in this case through keystroke dynamics or analysis of immediate last few pages viewed.

Ad Insertion

When a user visits a web page, this page then points to an ad-network.  The content served by the ad-network then identifies if the user has Adnostic or not. If not, the ad-network loads a specific ad to the publisher page. If yes, the ad-network sends n number of ads. Using browser’s history database, Adnostic will choose one of the n ads. Choice of n is configurable. Larger n means more precise targeting but increases network bandwith, and vice versa.

This is the summary of the article by Koen De Bock and Dirk Van den Poel, which presents a model for analyzing demographic information and click stream data to create web user demographic profiles. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Predicting web site audience demographics..

The online advertisement industry is a very large industry, and is growing rapidly. Thus, many advertisers and researchers are motivated to improve the effectiveness of online ads further. One of these methods is advertisement personalization.

Advertisement Personalization

This method aims to precisely target advertisements to online users based on their web characteristics. An example is behavioral targeting, which tracks online information of users using clickstream data, search term usage, among others. In addition, behavioral data can be combined with user specified preferences, customization settings and demographic information to further enhance its capabilities.

Demographic information collection

Originally, demographic information is used as a targeting tool for old media advertising efforts, and is deemed inferior to behavioral targeting. However, demographic is shown to be the second most important option after behavioral targeting according. This is true because brand building is one web advertising function that can benefit from this information. Brand building doesn’t have to have direct response as a result of interactivity, which is beneficial for behavioral targeting. Online, collecting demographic information is challenging because of the anonymous nature of web activity. However, there are several solutions for this, including user registration, and having demographic profiles through web surveys. There are several issues to these solutions however, such as costly efforts, visitor annoyance risks and applicability to only a few websites.

Clickstream patterns plus Demographic Attributes

This paper proposes a cheap and effective way to create a demographic profile of web users. This involves collecting click stream patterns and demographic attributes and applying the two to Random Forest classifiers to create demographic attributes of anonymous visitors to a particular website. Organizations which use this method can benefit by using the results as additional data for behavioral targeting, or as demographic predictions of their visitors.

Model Training and Scoring

The first phase in the methodology of this study is the model training phase. Here, data is collected to train the Random forest predictive models. These data are demographic info from random online surveys, and clickstreams from server logs. These two then serve as input for training the models. The next phase is the scoring phase, which is the application of the Random forest classifier models. In this phase, demographic profiles are obtained. Unlike the previous phase, this phase can be done repeatedly for various websites.

Data Collection and Model Verification

The model validation and demonstration is done through a Belgian organization. Data was collected twice, in September 2006 and February 2007. The respondents were randomly surveyed to obtain demographic info, and cookie tracking was used to collect click stream data.

Results

Results in this study show that the Random Forest models are superior compared to other benchmark algorithms. Furthermore, these models are most accurate in predicting gender, which is accurate at 69%. The other three demographics are under 50% accurate, but still do extensively better than other algorithms. On average, the obtained demographic profiles in this study are good, showing that this model can be used for applications in business, helping managers choose the websites they will use for online advertising. This also shows that demographic information is still relevant for web advertising.

This is the summary of the article by Chris Jay Hoofnagle, which discusses about Google’s policies and privacy methods with regard to the information being shared around the world and how they respond to the information privacy concerns about their product. This essay also criticizes one of the company’s mottos “you can make money without doing evil”. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting article here: Beyond Google and Evil

Google’s privacy issues not yet resolved

These discussions are based on the hundreds of news articles taken from many sources, including Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. According to their sources, Google says to the public that their privacy issues have been resolved even though this isn’t true. Every time the company is asked about privacy, they always respond with “privacy is important” or something like that. In this manner, consumers will feel at peace and not mind about privacy because of the company’s good services, putting them in the top ten most trusted companies for privacy.

Definition of Privacy

The problem roots from the varying definitions of the word “privacy” as understood by the consumer or by the company. Every time the customer hears “privacy is important” they would assume that the company meets their broad definition of privacy. But this is not the case. The evil in their motto, “you can make money without doing evil”, actually denotes the old advertising practices; instead of using the old flashy popup ads, they introduced sponsored links – one of the bases of the regulatory standards requiring search engines to separate sponsored links from organic ones.

Google’s advertising techniques a danger to privacy

Google’s advertising methods analyzed from ad clicks may threaten the creative appeals of advertising copywriters, but they say this can stop the fraudulent style of bait and switch, where users are lured into a product but getting a substitute instead. Behavioral advertising created tradeoffs between information collection and better advertising results and Google had to adopt its techniques over the years. In 2008, Google claimed that their technique was different from behavioral targeting since they only capture what the user recently searched as opposed to others who look at what the user did days ago. Google also mentioned about “technological safeguards” for the chat messages and emails in the Gmail accounts, yet they failed to disprove that it is an e-mail service that analyzes the content of the user’s messages to tailor advertising and act as surveillance systems, performing without the knowledge of the users. Their intention of grabbing personal information was clear when they purchased DoubleClick, another means of tracking individuals online. When the Viacom ordered Google to reveal the usage logs of Youtube.com, Google objected, arguing that the combination of IP addresses and usernames could identify individuals who used Youtube, although an engineer of Google concluded that in most cases, IP addresses alone cannot identify an individual.

Summary and Recommendations

To sum things up, Google’s “evil” talk is its burden because people have forgotten how troublesome searching is in the past, and so they associate “evil” as the company’s morality. Google should be reminding us about their contribution to a revolution in search advertising and how their model could give customers tools to avoid fraud like allowing them to tag advertisements as fraudulent. Also, the company should give more depth in their “privacy is important” talks as it leaves many unanswered questions. Google should also allow their victims to transfer all their data from Google’s services to another provider or system and to delete all the data that have been collected in an identifiable way.

Segmentation strategy is the concept of dissembling your clients and choosing to base your marketing efforts on a specific target group. In some cases you may target your efforts on more than one group, but the basic goal is to directly target each group on an individual basis so that you can maximize your sales profits. There are many different ways that you can cluster your clients, but most businesses either choose to dissect their client base either by purchasing groups based on factors such as income, region, or socio-economic factors or cluster their target audience by their typical buying and spending habits.

Segmentation strategy relies extensively on consumer research and behavioral analysis alongside extensive data collection techniques.  Due to the fact that it encompasses many areas of a business clientèle often it is a group effort on the part of the company and may require that a company rework its management and marketing team and strategies. The payoff is that when a marketing project is launched it is a proactive project aimed to reach those who are most likely to buy instead of focusing on a general market with an offer or deal that they may or may not be interested in.

An excellent example of segmentation strategy is international car industries such as Toyota, Honda, or Audi. In order to meet the needs of their regionalized clients these companies often produce different versions of successful cars that meet the needs of their residents. For example, certain countries such as Britain and Japan are focused heavily on the small compact electric vehicles that are on the market currently. Therefore, Toyota will market a small streamlined engine and compact vehicle here. However, in America where large and stylish is still the desired norm the same vehicle will in effect be built up to attract sales.

The effectiveness of segmentation strategy largely depends on the efforts that a company puts into it. In the online world designing different websites and emails for segmented clients is an excellent approach to reap the benefits of the market targeting strategy. Consultants are often a great place to start when initializing segmentation strategy as they already hold a large degree of the knowledge needed to make segmentation strategy work to its fullest degree. Supplementing a consultant’s knowledge with company data is an excellent way to cluster your clients and start to reap the benefits in profits of a carefully managed target audience.

Behavioral branding is the practice of presenting you product or service in a way using a combination of psychological knowledge and consumer behavioral patterns. When you use behavioral branding properly you can increase your promotion efforts and overall profits because branding your property in a memorable way will not only attract consumers quickly but also keep your product in their mind, increasing the probability that they will return to your website for repeat business. The basic science behind behavioral branding is packaging the image of your service or product in a way that attracts to your target audience.

A great example of how behavioral branding can be an effective promotion tool is if you look at the popular search engine Google. The multicolored text of the funky Google logo is instantly recognizable and memorable. This is one reason why many people are quick to use any new Google product that is developed, because once they see the logo or brand, they are quick to place their trust in the new web product as it is marked with a brand logo they trust and remember. In the same way, when you create a brand that customers recognize they are likely to purchase another effective product from you whether they immediately understand the product or not.

In a nutshell, behavioral branding involves creating your own logo, catchphrase, or graphic that will help people identify your products or services in a quick glance or while they surfing the Internet. If you own a web company behavioral branding is essential to spreading the word about your business since most web businesses advertise through banner ads or other forms of advertising similar to Adsense. Since consumers are used to seeing these advertisements online if you want yours to be notable you have to ensure that you catch their eye so that not only do they look, but they take a second look.

This is where behavioral branding comes into play. If you take a minute to study the buying trends of your consumers behavioral then you will have the inside track of what catches their eye and what they have no interest in. Once you have this information you know how to create a brand, advertisement, mailing, or promotion that will have them jumping at the chance to sample your product or service. As a result you will see your sales jump bringing you much higher revenues and easily paying off your investment of time or consulting fees.

Behavioral branding is a field that is growing immensely as social networking, online advertising, and web browsing studies are increasing in popularity by the day. Many smaller companies choose to hire a consultant firm for aid but if you are confident that you know your target audience well you can tackle it yourself. The one guarantee you have is that if you approach the matter correctly, you will see a positive result in both sales and brand recognition.