Behavioural Targeting - Keeping It Relevant

Display Advertising has changed somewhat over time. Creative formats have developed, creative executions have improved, user’s interaction with media has fundamentally changed.

The rapid improvements in targeting technology however contribute to the growth of the more standard types of display advertising.

Behavioural Targeting - What Is It?

Behavioural Targeting is the process adopted by online publishers and ad networks and utilised by advertisers to serve more relevant advertising to the audiences most likely to respond to them.

Behavioural Targeting - How Does It Work?

Different behavioural targeting providers utilise slightly different methods. However, the most common method is:

• Website / Web Page Visited - users who often visit sports based sites and read sports based content on major news sites, are cookied by ad networks when they enter their ‘network’ and would be identified as a sports segment. If an advertiser wanted to target a sports based audience, the ad network would deliver the impression the pool of users (cookies) that had been grouped into the sports pool

Why The Emergence of Behavioural Targeting

Behavioural Targeting has emerged to the forefront of media plans in recent years, mainly because of the reasons mentioned earlier in this article - to improve the relevancy of advertising served to users - specifically with the intention of improving both the CTR and conversion rate of a campaign and thus improving the cost efficiency of a given campaign.

Advertisers are moving away from targeting their audiences on specific sites that demographically match their targeted audience - they are moving to a concept where you buy audiences and not sites (make no mistake, site specific buys are still prevalent in online planning, but networks are growing and the inventory available to networks is driven by the ever increasing remnant inventory not sold on specific sites).

The benefits to doing this are:

• Cheaper access to your audiences
• Larger reach - reaching them across multiple touchpoints
• Greater control over optimising

Personally, our experiences with behavoural targeting have been somewhat mixed. Although it is more cost effective - reaching an affluent ABC1 user will be cheaper on a network utilising behavioural targeting than buying inventory on the FT.com - on more generic, mass market the uplift in results from behavioural targeting sometimes does not justify the increased cost of media compared to a standard blind network buy.

Retargeting - The Real Winner

An element to ‘behavioural targeting’ is something called retargeting / re-messaging (although they are so different they really should be regarded as completely different entities).

What Is Retargeting and How Does It Work?

Retargeting is simply serving advertising to users who have previously interacted with your advertising or who have previously expressed an interest in your product / service by visiting your site.

The process works like so:

• A cookie is dropped on a user when they land on your site
• When they re-enter a specific network, that user can be retargeted with advertising.

Retargeting is another way of making your advertising more relevant and more effective. It is serving ads to ‘warm prospects’ rather than cold. new prospects.

In my experience, I have often see a CTR 100% better than standard targeting and it also converts between 50 - 90% better. There is a premium on the price of retargeting but the uplift in CTR and Conversion Rate often justifies the rate increase.

Retargeting Considerations

Although retargeting can drive a fantastic ROI (despite paying upwards of £1.50CPM for it), you do need to consider the following:

• The volume of traffic your site receives
• The volume of the booking / impressions being bought.

Firstly, if your site receives very little traffic, there is therefore an insufficient pool of users to retarget against. This is why secondly, the volume of the booking needs to be realistic and the volume of impressions being bought needs to be considered.

Take the below example:

• Site Receives 70,000 unique users a month

• Impressions being bought - 2,500,000 (on a £5k spend @ at a rate of £2)

In order for the booking to be delivered in full - every user will on average be served an ad 35 times!

Important note - only sites with enough traffic to retarget should consider retargeting as a profitable, viable route to incremenal volume.

Search Retargeting - Taking It A Step Further

Another form of retargeting is that of Search Retargeting. The concept is pretty self explanatory - you are retargeting your search traffic. With some ad networks it is possible to append your URL redirects to include a certain piece of code which enables the ad network to identify the user has come via a search engine and those users can then be cookied and retargeted.

The obvious benefits to this is that you are not just retargeting any one who may arrive at your site but taking that relevancy even further by retargeting the users specifically looking for your brand (or product / service).

However, the uptake of such technology has been slow. The reasons for simply are because you need to receive a hell of alot of clicks from a search engine to build a large enough pool of users to retarget against - similar to what was discussed above. The method could and should be tested by the truly large brands such as MoneySupermarket, O2 etc but do not even think about it if your volume of clicks from search is under 100,000 a month!

Behavioural targeting and retargeting has its obvious benefits and can and does work. However, like with any venture into the display advertising arena, the cost of media and the ability to optimise are critical to any success.

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