Online advertising business is becoming more and more competitive nowadays. To maintain its competitiveness, Yahoo unveiled its Yahoo Smart Ads, a smart system which allows marketers to tailor their advertising content based on individual users’ online behavior. It makes the ads more effective, relevant, and interactive besides making the ads business more lucrative for Yahoo.
This behavioral targeting advertising strategy is also widely adopted by internet giants such as Google and Microsoft. Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have spent substantial money to acquire advertising firms which help to track web users’ habits for their online advertising business.
Yahoo SmartAds will study users’ behaviour, age, habits, geographical location, etc and connect them with marketing that caters to their interests. For instance, Yahoo might identify a user’s age and sex from his account registration. His search record might reveal that he is looking for a digital camera and he is staying in New York. The ads will then lead him to the shops that offer the products he is looking for. This new technology will assist users or web surfers to avoid a clutter of random ads and lead them to the relevant ads that serve their need. To customize the advertisements, marketers need to provide Yahoo with artwork and audience research so that SmartAds can generate thousands of unique combinations, each adapted to a particular user.
After all, SmartAds is a brilliant idea and makes advertising more effective and targets more relevant market catchments via internet. At the same time, it also reduces surfers’ time and effort to seek for relevant information.