The increasing use of the Internet caused a shift in how people do business. At present, business owners have to deal with stiffer competition and stricter regulations. Tracking users on the Web, while sometimes considered an infringement of privacy, is widely done by most sites today. For some organizations, tracking user behavior and patterns is actually crucial in keeping their businesses up and running.

Google (60.3%) and Facebook (27.1%) were two of the major trackers of online user behavior. Tracking online behavior has a lot to do with creating buyer personas that allow site owners to craft advertising campaigns that target their audience accurately. This technique is known as “behavioral targeting.”

This post discusses what behavioral targeting is, how it helps businesses to succeed, and how IP Geolocation Lookup can help with it.

What Is Behavioral Targeting?

Behavioral targeting is a marketing effort that zeroes in on Internet users’ browsing activities and shopping behavior. Companies benefit from it by creating advertising or content marketing campaigns that are sure to be relevant to users’ online habits and interests. Behavioral targeting systems compile users’ Internet search and purchasing histories, frequently visited sites, and geographical location to build complete user profiles.

Advantages of Behavioral Targeting

While behavioral targeting is perceived to be highly data-centric, its benefits are more tangible than abstract scale measurements. Aside from helping advertisers refine their efforts, it can help business owners as well.

Personalize Content with Ease

One of the ways in which companies increase site traffic is by personalizing content. Tracking online user behavior can help them improve their website analysis. By knowing where most of their visitors come from, for instance, they can adjust their content to improve user experience.

With the users’ IP addresses, marketers and advertisers will know what time they visit sites, what pages they view, whether they purchased goods or availed of services, what language and currency they use, and more. That said, using an IP geo lookup tool would make it easier for businesses to cater to the specific preferences of a target audience with highly personalized content. It enhances their user experience and motivates them to keep coming back to the site.

Increase User Engagement

Engagement increases when visitors find the site content highly relevant. E-commerce sites, for instance, can improve engagement by letting visitors know when seasonal sales are ongoing in their areas.

Various countries have different holidays. Knowing where visitors come from aided by IP address geo lookup can help stores serve the right content at the right time. This approach will help businesses ensure that a sale alert for the U.K. users, for example, would not pop up for Asian visitors. As such, the Asians would not feel alienated while those from the U.K. would feel more engaged and thus be more likely to buy products.

Publish Content at the Right Time

Analyzing online user behavior also allows site owners to identify when visitors flock to their portals. They can use this information to time when new content is published to generate more page views and increase user engagement.

IP geo lookup can help with this by timing publishing based on where the majority of visitors originate. If most of the readers of a publishing site based in India, for instance, come from the U.S., its owner can schedule post publishing to when most U.S. readers are awake and ready to read the news.

Improving a Data Management Platform with IP Geolocation Lookup

A data management platform (DMP) enables behavioral targeting. This tool allows business owners to harvest data, keep it for analysis, and use the results to come up with sound behavior-based advertising recommendations. It does so in these five stages:

• Data collection: This step involves gathering data via APIs, event trackers, and server-to-server integration. Most of the information collected comes from data brokers, demand-side platforms, and other DMPs.
• Data normalization and enrichment: This step organizes data into a structured format to enhance its quality and value. Normalization involves analyzing the cookies and eliminating redundant or useless data. Enrichment refers to making the data relevant to the users. A site owner can, for instance, use an IP geolocation lookup tool to extract the user’s network name from his user agent string.
• Profile building: Data analysts use the data collected to build new user profiles or add to existing ones. If an IP address turns up twice, for instance, but gives out different information, the new behaviors observed can be added to that IP address’s existing profile.
• Data storage: This step involves storing all data, which can be challenging when the amount is enormous. Users need to make sure that none of the data gets lost in transit.
• Segmentation: This step classifies users. Site owners can, for instance, group them by geographical location. Segmenting target audiences this way can help them personalize content and offerings based on their profiles.

Data gathering is an essential step in creating marketing and advertising campaigns. Researchers and data analysts who use efficient data gathering tools, such as IP geo lookup tools and cookie IDs, can arrive at more accurate results. Accurate analyses can allow them to come up with comprehensive user profiles that will help them cater to specific customer needs, thus enhancing engagement and satisfaction and ensuring their business’s success.