Targeting (advertising)

Targeted advertising is a form of advertising that online advertisers can use sophisticated methods to the most receptive audiences with certain traits, which is based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic which are focused on race, economic status, sex, age, the level of education, income level and employment or they can be psychographic focused which are based on the consumer's values, personality, attitudes, opinions, lifestyles and interests. They can also be behavioral variables, such as browser history, purchase history, and other recent activity. Targeted advertising is focused on certain traits and the consumers who are likely to have a strong preference will receive the message instead of those who have no interest and whose preferences do not match a product's attribute this eliminates wastage.

Traditional forms of advertising, including billboards, newspapers, magazines and radio, are progressively becoming replaced by online advertisements.Information and communication technology (ICT) space has transformed over recent years, resulting in targeted advertising to stretch across all ICT technologies, such as web, IPTV, and mobile environments. In next generation advertising, the importance of targeted advertisements will radically increase, as it spreads across numerous ICT channels cohesively.

Through the emergence of new online channels, the need for targeted advertising is increasing because companies aim to minimize wasted advertising by means of information technology. Most targeted new media advertising currently uses second-order proxies for targetings, such as tracking online or mobile web activities of consumers, associating historical web page consumer demographics with new consumer web page access, using a search word as the basis for implied interest, or contextual advertising.

Web services are continually generating new business ventures and revenue opportunities for internet corporations. Companies have rapidly developing technological capabilities that allow them to gather information about web users. By tracking and monitoring what websites users visit, internet service providers can directly show ads that are relative to the consumer's preferences. Most of today's websites are using these targeting technology to track user's internet behaviour and there is much debate over the privacy issues present.

Search engine marketing uses search engines to reach target audiences. For example, Google's Google Remarketing Campaigns are a type of targeted advertising where websites use the IP addresses of computers that have visited their websites to remarket their ad specifically to the user who has previously been on their website as they use websites that are a part of the Google display network, or when searching for keywords related to a product or service on the google search engine. Dynamic remarketing can improve the targeted advertising as the ads are able to include the products or services that the consumers have previously viewed on the advertisers' website within the ads.

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