Targeting

Targeting

• Targeting is about selecting the right audience for the advertisement. Users call this “relevance”.

• For ad-based businesses, that means knowing rour users very well so you can sell to the right advertiser and campaign at highest possible value.

• “Selecting the right audience is a much larger driver of value than is creative theme”

Demographic Targeting• This means defining audiences in terms of

‣ Age

‣ Gender

‣ Income

‣ Occupation

‣ Household size

• Works well for broad-interest advertisers (consumer electronics, travel, etc).

Contextual Targeting

• Placing ads on a page in relation to the content. Example: shampoo ads next to articles about hair care.

• Advertisers value the context, the location and the editorial environment in which their ads appear – i.e. association of the company’s brand with high quality content. This is why there is a reluctance to advertise on UGC sites.

Behavioral Targeting

• Learning about the audience by observing their visits across the web, then serving appropriate ads, regardless of context.

• Example: you visited an indie music site, a child care site and a site dedicated to researching BMW prices --> show the car ads on the child care site

Geographic Targeting

• Geotargeting = Serving ads to particular geographic areas.

‣ DMA (designated market zones)

‣ Area code

‣ Time zones

‣ Country, city, state, zip

‣ IP address

• Works best to drive people to local offers

Factoid: 27% of all searches are for local products and services.

Daypart Targeting

• Targeting based on the time of day or day of week

‣ morning commute radio ads

‣ 8pm - 10pm = prime time TV

‣ beer ads on friday afternoons

‣ lunchtime ads for KFC

Affinity Targeting

• Targeting the users of a particular site who are known to like the site more than other visitors.

• Example: running ads on fan sites

Purchase-Based Category Targeting

• Targeting ads based on detailed profiles assembled from watching the site visiting and spending habits of the audience.

‣ example: heavy shaving gel users tend to visit sport sites, online auction sites and automotive sites but not bulletin-board sites

Misc Targeting

• “The Roadblock” = buying up ad space such that people can not escape it

‣ ex-1: running an ad across all major network tv stations at the same time, so when flipping channels you can’t escape

‣ ex-2: running your banner ad on all major portals and media sites at lunch on friday

Reach and Frequency

Basics

• Reach = how many people you show the advertisement to

• Frequency = how many times you show the ad to them

‣ overexposing can lead to underperforming

‣ rule of thumb: effectiveness diminished somewhere between 4 and 10 exposures

• Don’t forget, high quality messages matter too, because dumb messages with huge reach and frequency don’t matter.

Definitions• Percent Reach: the percentage of individuals who visited a particular website among

the total number of individuals using the web during a given time period

• Planned impressions: the number of impressions in the media buy for the particular site during a given time period.

• Target impressions: the number of impressions in the media buy served to a particular audience at that site. Derived from total page views by that audience as a % of total pages.

• Percent planned / target impressions: number that shows the “demo conversion factor” for each entity

• Frequency: the number of ads the average person could be exposed to in a given time period

• Unique visitors delivered: the number of people in the target audience who will have the opportunity to see an ad at least once

• Percent reach delivered: the percentage of the target audience who will have the opportunity to see the online advertisement at least once.

• Average frequency: the number of ads the average person in the target audience is exposed to in a given time period

Managing Reach & Frequencyby balancing usage groups

• Balance heavy, medium and light users and ensure that heavy users don’t consume all the inventory

‣ Implication: advertisers spread their buy across many sites

‣ Implication: our effective inventory is lower if we spread it across the usage groups

Depth of visit

• Ads tend to get higher click-through rates when displayed as the first few pages of a person’s visit to the site