How and Why Behavioral Advertising Works - Looking Deeper
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Looking more closely at specific categories can be even more eye-opening. Check out the “shoppers” category of web surfers, for instance. Shoppers clicked through most often on ads on career sites, but when it came to actually taking action, that happened most on female-oriented sites. And for the “Travelers” category, while the greatest click-through rate came from food sites, the greatest action-through rate came from career sites.
Again, it’s very tempting to speculate about the reasons why. Jason Lee Miller, commenting on the study for Webpronews, noted that “This could make sense if you think that job-seekers just dream about the new stuff they can get if they get that new job. They don’t actually have the means to buy that cashmere sweater just yet. Women with credit cards at the ready, however, are a different story altogether.”
Of course, we could overanalyze this to our heart’s content, but that would be missing the forest for the trees. What’s the main take-home point here? “Behavioral targeting is one of the most effective techniques in driving conversions, but what this study reveals is that pre-packaged audience segments and automated rules-based targeting may not capture the full benefits of behavioral targeting,” pointed out Alyson Yaffe, media supervisor for Media Contacts. “Instead, ad networks need to focus on custom segmentation and data analysis to optimize the nuances of behavioral targeting for each campaign.”
It’s worth noting that the way this study was conducted, and its findings, are more sophisticated and nuanced than previous studies that examined behavioral targeting. For example, an eye-tracking study conducted within the past year by the media company Tacoda and Next Century Media found that, on average, the same ad was looked at 17 percent more when it was first exposed to web surfers in a way that targeted behaviors rather than context. After the ad appeared a second time, web surfers gave it 54 percent more looks if it was shown in a way that targeted behavior rather than context.
It sounds impressive, but that particular study was limited. The sample was made up of 18-to-64-year-olds shopping in New Jersey and California malls for plasma TVs, new cars, and computers – and only 15 participants were tested for each targeting type. Note also that the study measured only looks and time spent, not CTR and ATR as does the BL Labs study.
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