Behavioral re-targeting is becoming a  buzz word in internet marketing world.  Lets find how it helps in up selling and force users to complete the purchase cycle. Report says 51-66% users on ecommerce sites starts browsing products but does not complete the purchase process. Behavioral re-targeting helps to bring back those diverted customers who actually started the cycle but not finished it for some reason.

Now the question comes how does it happen? The idea is to track the behavior of a user and collecting historical data. Depending on the historical data you can profile the customer. With the help of third party cookie, the large advertising sites/social networking sites try to capture the traversal path/clickstream of a particular user. From there they create user profile depending on their likes/dislikes of products or services.  Depending on the profile, marketers create the campaign which includes engaging emails, attractive text, videos etc. on that specific user. Again, campaign designing is a big chapter which requires different set of skills.

Brand recognization

Now, let’s get dipper into third party cookie and try to know how it works. Before that we need to know what is first party cookie. If Appsbee.com sets a cookie to a user browser, only appsbee can track its cookie information. This is called first party cookie. Suppose Appsbee.com uses a banner from banner.com. Banner.com also can set a cookie to the user machine who are browsing appsbee.com. Here, the cookie set by banner.com is called third party cookie. If the user visits another site called anothersite.com which uses the advertising banner from banner.com also, it can recognize the user since it has the cookie saved previously to the user computer. If we consider the banner.com site has banners in 50,000 sites and the user visits 60 of them, banner.com can analyze the behavior of the user and it creates a mapping database may be with a unique id “user-945623” and banner.com comes to a decision that the user loves music J for example. Even though it does not capture your personal information. Interesting right?

Similar way bigger social networks like facebook tracks your user behavior by setting third party cookie from different sites wherever the sites use FB like, share or any FB button. I am not sure if any individual or company apart from those large social networks or advert companies can guarantee to provide those tracking data. This tracking or behavior analysis data is the key to design your next BRT campaign.