In its infancy, Behavioural targeting was hailed as a ‘Planner-slayer’: a power tool which could find the perfect audience for any campaign, leaving the online planner with very little to do.
The reality is that far from delivering instant success, Behavioural Targeting still requires thought, care and testing to make it work.
Off-the peg doesn’t fit everyone
Many sites and networks trade on the basis of a set of pre-built Behavioural segments, based on the target audiences they are most often briefed to reach. For example, Sport enthusiasts & Finance researchers. This enables the publisher to build up a great deal of data over time, ensuring the segment is robust. For some campaigns, these off-the peg segments closely match the target audience, and can represent good value.
For many, however, they are too broad. The rate mark-up on Behavioural targeting means that an ill-fitting segment will often bring in a higher Cost-per-Response than untargeted activity on the same site.
Building a successful bespoke segment is dependent on the Planner’s understanding of their objectives and target audience, and the Media owners knowledge of how their targeting technology works, and what it can realistically offer.
For example: Narrowing a ‘Finance Researcher’ segment to target a specific financial product yielded a significant increase in both Click through rate, and conversion rate.
Tight tailoring inhibits growth
The problem with carefully tailored bespoke segments is that they are often very small, and while they can yield very efficient responses, the volume is likely to remain static – or even to shrink once the segment has been saturated.
Growing volume using Behavioural technology is just as hard as growing without it – the challenge is to find new audience groups who will respond to your campaign. Behavioural Targeting helps planners reach audiences, but does not tell them who they should be reaching.
For some campaigns, the best approach may be a ‘leap of faith’; running a broad campaign across a network equipped with Behavioural Targeting optimisation technology, which gradually builds a profile of the behaviours exhibited by people who have responded to the campaign, and targets people whose behaviour is similar.
With the right technology and expert campaign management, this approach can generate response that is both efficient and high volume, but there will always be a learning period – during which the Cost-per-Response may be frighteningly high.
While Behavioural Targeting technology is likely to continue to evolve and become more powerful it doesn’t look set to put anyone out of a job in the foreseeable future.
