Among shoppers who buy something online or at a store after conducting web research, nearly half make a purchase within three days. So says a new report, "Behavioral Targeting: Pushing Relevance to Maximize Advertising Spending," conducted by JupiterResearch.

The report also reveals that 65 percent of online shoppers pay more attention to behaviorally targeted ads, which are based on a consumer's tracked shopping behavior, than to contextual ads, which appear on web pages showing content related to the ads. "Since its inception, behavioral targeting has been an evolution of contextual advertising, and these findings are testament to its power to more effectively engage with consumers on their own level," said Marla R. Schimke, VP of marketing for AudienceScience, a company formerly known as Revenue Science.

"If we conduct the same study in a year, five years, 10 years, I believe we will see this already substantial gap between the two continue to widen, as more and more brands and marketers realize that they can use behavioral targeting to specifically target their ideal customer," Schimke added. She also pointed out that the study illustrates the importance of marketers' ability to send targeted messages to shoppers, wherever they are online. "These numbers indicate that the typical shopping process involves a user traveling to multiple sites, multiple times, making the ability to communicate marketing messages to them, no matter where they are online, all the more important," she said.

JupiterResearch is a unit of Forrester Research Inc. This study was conducted among 2,151 U.S. online consumers for AudienceScience, which provides behaviorally targeted ads for advertisers. Information in this article was edited from a story in InternetRetailer.com.