Targeted advertising

Targeted advertising or data-driven marketing is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.

These traits can either be demographic with a focus on race, economic status, sex, age, generation, level of education, income level, and employment, or psychographic focused on the consumer values, personality, attitude, opinion, lifestyle, and interests. This focus can also entail behavioral variables, such as browser history, purchase history, and other recent online activities. The process of algorithm targeting eliminates waste.

Traditional forms of advertising, including billboards, newspapers, magazines, and radio channels, are progressively becoming replaced by online advertisements.

Through the emergence of new online channels, the usefulness of targeted advertising is increasing because companies aim to minimize wasted advertising. Most targeted new media advertising currently uses second-order proxies for targets, 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 of implied interest, or contextual advertising.

Companies have technology that allows 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 technologies to track users' internet behavior and there is much debate over the privacy issues present.

Search engine marketing uses search engines to reach target audiences. For example, Google's Remarketing Campaigns are a type of targeted marketing where advertisers use the IP addresses of computers that have visited their websites to remarket their ad specifically to users who have previously been on their website whilst they browse 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 targeted advertising as the ads can include the products or services that the consumers have previously viewed on the advertisers' websites within the ads.

Google Ads includes different platforms. The Search Network displays the ads on 'Google Search, other Google sites such as Maps and Shopping, and hundreds of non-Google search partner websites that show ads matched to search results'. 'The Display Network includes a collection of Google websites (like Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger, and YouTube), partner sites, and mobile sites and apps that show adverts from Google Ads matched to the content on a given page.'

These two kinds of advertising networks can be beneficial for each specific goal of the company, or type of company. For example, the search network can benefit a company to reach consumers actively searching for a particular product or service.