• Harvard Business Review, Wednesday, April 6, 2016 9:17 AM

Using online tracking technology, marketers no longer have to rely on assumptions about consumer behavior, according to a report in the Harvard Business Review. They can deliver ads targeted specifically to individuals based on their behavior online. While marketers have long known that this type of personalized advertising is more effective at generating both clicks and conversions, they haven't fully understood the consumer psychology that makes these behaviorally targeted ads so effective. HBR's research, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, explored whether behaviorally targeted ads have unique psychological consequences that help make them more effective than ads that rely on traditional demographic or psychographic targeting. In one study, HBR conducted with 188 undergraduate students, it found that participants were more interested in buying a Groupon for a restaurant advertised as sophisticated when they thought the ad had been targeted to them based on specific websites they had visited during an earlier task vs. when they thought the ad was targeted based on demographics (their age and gender) or not targeted at all.

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