Behavioral Ad Targeting, New Income Generator
Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 3:53 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine
Behavioral ad targeting is as old as Homer. (The 9th century BC Greek storyteller, not the TV cartoon. Though, the latter is getting up there too.) But its online form is getting more and more popular, according to Forrester.
In essence, the idea takes contextual ads to the next level. Find out something about your potential customer by ‘observing’ their behavior and feed them ads based on that. Simple.
And effective.
Clickthrough rates increase 166%, according to one study by 24/7 Real Media. (For the non-mathematically inclined that’s less than double, more than one and a half times. Not 166 times. Still a very healthy increase.) As high as 200% according to another cited by Yahoo! Chief Data Officer, Usama Fayyad.
And, of course, there are as many ways to ‘observe’ and find out about behavior as there are men named Homer. Search queries is only the most primitive, but there are others. Clickstream analysis is another. Observing comparison shopping, trip planning, news reading… the list is endless.
And the more data the better since marketing is sometimes like talking to your dog. They don’t tell you directly what they want, so you have to gather all the clues you can to figure it out. (Now if we could only get dogs to click on PPC ads. Er, maybe we shouldn’t give the click fraudsters any ideas.)
But having lots of data isn’t the goal. There’s usually more data than you know what to do with in studying online behavior. The key is to be able to separate what’s meaningful and useful from what’s unimportant.
Fortunately, the technology and services available for doing that are getting increasingly prevalent and more sophisticated. Like the original Homer, not the cartoon one.
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You said “rates increase 166%…that’s less than double, more than one and a half times” which is not correct.
If had a net worth of $100 and then it increased 50% I would then have $150. If it instead increased by 100% I would then have $200. If it instead incresead by 166% I would then have $266, which is 2.66 times as much as I started with.