
Google worked on behavioral targeting for quite sometime and then opened this to adwords users. Google has associated a user’s browser cookie with its pre-defined interest categories (e.g. “Arts & Entertainment – Humor”, “Food & Drink – Cooking & Recipes”). Google aligns a user’s profile to a specific category and give advertisers a right to target the ads to a specific category or set of categories. But google still primarily tracks a users behavior through its searches. Hence, there could still be a set of data that it may be missing out i.e. it may not be reporting the engagement level and buying pattern of a user, which could lead to even better targeting, consequently great results in terms of ROI.
Preceision match seems to be addressing the solution for this and making display performance campaign more effective. Going by the description, it seems an advertiser can actually buy user behavior instead of impressions, clicks or views. If it is so, digital marketing will become even more effective and a lot of money going to flow towards digital media in this year. Although, we need to wait to see how users are going to respond to it. Whether they are going to consider it a better way of showing the ads of the products, which they are actually interested in, or will consider it a breach of privacy and stalking them in virtual world. Only time can tell.