Glossary
What is Behavioural targeting?
Also called: behavioral targeting, audience targeting
Behavioural targeting shows ads based on what is known about a person, such as browsing history or past purchases, rather than the page they are on.
हिंदी में पढ़ेंBehavioural targeting uses signals about the person: sites visited, products viewed, past purchases or audience segments. A travel brand’s DSP that knows a reader browsed flights last week may bid more for her, whatever article she is reading. Retargeting, showing ads to people who visited a site before, is one common form.
It depends on recognising the reader, which needs an identifier and, in many regions, consent. Third-party cookies have done this job in Chrome, where they still work by default, but Safari blocks them and Firefox isolates them per site. In Europe, a reader who rejects consent gets no personalised ads, and Google can fall back to limited ads.
That is why the same slot can earn very different prices. In a 2019 Google test, publisher revenue fell by about half when third-party cookies were disabled for part of the traffic. Publishers keep behavioural demand with consented first-party and logged-in IDs, and cover the rest with contextual signals.
Example
Two readers open the same article. The DSP recognises reader one from a cookie and knows she browsed flights, so a travel brand bids, say, $3.00 CPM. Reader two is on Safari with no match, and the bid is $1.50. Same slot, double the price for the recognised reader.
Why it matters to publishers
Recognised readers usually attract higher bids, so identity coverage shapes your CPMs. Splitting CPM by browser shows how much behavioural demand is worth on your site.