Why and How Of Online Behavioral Advertising
The digital advertising world is taking giant strides towards growth and development. Have a glance around and you will come across the adoption of new advertising tactics and strategies. New age marketers are always on the lookout for the latest advertising techniques, thus ensuring unique branding for enterprises and business establishments.
With the arrival of Online Behavioral Advertising or OBA, the online marketing arena has enough reasons to smile. The concept of OBA involves a profound and critical study on specific customer behavior, thus resulting in better advertising decisions.
What is Online Behavioral Adverting?
With this brief overview, let us develop an idea of what is Online Behavioral Advertising? The term refers to a group of activities that firms perform, in order to collect information about the behavioral trends of potential customers on the digital platform. To put it in simple words, OBA is the process of tracking customer choices or preferences on the virtual platform.
By acquiring this information, companies get a hang of the type of contents or advertisements that you nurture a liking for. They use the information for targeting relevant contents towards you.
How OBA (Online Behavioral Adverting) works?
For developing a proper understanding of Online Behavioral Advertising, it will be necessary to comprehend its underlying mechanism. So, let us find out how OBA works. Companies or potential advertisers utilize numerous tools for performing OBA. The typical examples of these tools are cookies (better known as ‘beacons,’ ‘flash cookies’, and ‘tracking pixels’). These are tiny files that get stored on your device, whenever you pay visits to new websites.
Marketers and firms harness the information stored in these files to develop an idea about your specific interest areas. While doing so, they seek references from:
- The web pages visited by you
- The content you clicked to watch
- Several other online actions
Is it an intrusion on privacy?
Perhaps, it is not. Most of the times, the data collected by advertisers or marketers do not have any connections with your personal data or information. The Online Behavioral Advertising strategies do not provide them with your personal data such as address, contact numbers or name. Rather, you are identified as an ID number, and marketers try to gauge your interest areas based on your activities on the online platform. The data retained by them might include:
- Inferences about your age group
- Assumptions about your gender
- Inferences about your purchase preferences and interests
Do Customers Enjoy Any Control?
There is simply no reason for you to think that online behavioral advertising will completely expose you to the virtual platform. As stated earlier, what marketers achieve by adopting this strategy is nothing more than information about your online actions. In spite of that, there are quite a few steps you can take if you wish to restrict access to your purchase interests.
The three prime areas offering you opportunities for exercising control over OBA experience are:
- The “Forward I icon
- Browser level security
- Direct opt-outs and privacy policies
By utilizing these control features, you will have a chance to restrict marketers from collecting or using information gathered about your choices and preferences.
Also Read: Most Efficient and Effective Online Marketing Tips