The concept of behavioural targeting in search is to observe a user’s online search behaviour anonymously and then serve the most relevant ads based on their behaviour.Theoretically, this helps advertisers deliver their online ads to the users who are most likely to be receptive to their messages.
Behavioural targeting is available to a certain extent in all search products, through geotargeting options and the choice of sites where adverts should appear on content sites. MSN goes one step further for their search and display advertising; advertisers can incrementally bid for location, day, time, age and gender, based on historic trends of types of visitors who have shown an interest in your site and products.
Google’s personalised homepages gather increasing amounts of data on user behaviour and the recent implementation of an ad quality initiative shows how this search trend data can be used. If you frequently search on certain keywords in Google, you may start seeing ads in different positions on the page. This is done in an attempt to match the ads with your previous behaviour. The theory behind it is that if you have done lots of searches for the same keywords, without displaying normal user behaviour (i.e. you haven’t clicked on any ads), the ads displayed can’t have been relevant to you and therefore Google will show you different ads to improve your user experience.
