What's Your Marketing Mood: eBay's Emotion-Based Ads

An effective marketing strategy is all about identifying your target audience and finding something that will speak to them. Christmas is a prime time for companies to use emotional marketing in their campaigns, but can finding out more about how people are feeling help your strategy throughout the year?

Online auction website eBay certainly thinks so. With an estimated 165 million active users globally, tracking data of the people that land on its website can give the company valuable insight about their customers' behaviour and how to improve the user journey.

eBay's new 'Mood Marketing'

This is why eBay launched its Advertising Advanced Targeting, and Mood Marketing is the latest of these. It is hoped that the features will help the company to better understand how to resolve the problems it currently experiences.

How it works

Behavioural data is collected anonymously from website users across nine more specific areas. This will help eBay to determine what shoppers are interested in or need at the moment they land on their webpage, rather than trying to predict what they will feel further through the buyer cycle.

Once the mood of the user has been identified, eBay's Mood Marketing presents the browser with the ad that will be most relevant to them and their desires. It's hoped that this will help increase the engagement levels of people viewing ads on the webpage, and encourage them to click.

This latest move from eBay represents a change in customer behaviour, with most online shoppers now showing little to no loyalty towards the brands they use. This can make their activity on a ecommerce website like eBay - which showcases multiple sellers and brands - unpredictable, and designing a marketing strategy to effectively target them difficult.

Taking marketing to the next level

Research has shown that one of the best ways to target people is to treat them as individuals, especially for users who fall into the millennial demographic. Users in this age range are prepared to have their data gathered when they visit a webpage, but expect their browsing experience to be significantly improved as a result.

It's hoped that eBay's new Mood Marketing will take personalised marketing to the next level, but it's something that's been around for a while. Google's own Micro-Moments aims to empower users and present them with the results they want the most, instead of forcing them to trawl through webpage after webpage.

The move could significantly help eBay, which has a fairly diverse range of users. So if you go online to find something for your upcoming holiday, you'll see ads for swimwear, but if you want to find a Christmas present for your Dad, adverts for gadgets will appear. This benefits eBay by ensuring that customers don't get bored and go somewhere else to make their purchase, but should also make the consumer journey much better for shoppers using the site.