NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Is targeting a bad thing when everyone does it??
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Is targeting a bad thing when everyone does it??
Andy Bourland (andy_at_clickz.com)
Wed, 27 May 1998 09:59:20 -0400
An excellent topic, Richard...
We did a relaunch of Microscope earlier this year to focus
on this topic. The plan: have a different guest media
planner every week conduct a mini ad campaign utilizing the
DoubleClick Network. We used the DoubleClick Network (yes,
they were paying sponsors, contributing the ad inventory and
extensive support for the guest media planners) because the
sites and technology represent a useful playing ground to
observe the impact of utilizing different targeting,
filtering and site selection criteria. Here was a place
where we could come up with a solid answer to Keith Pieper's
question: when you've done all the targeting, what is the
value of the leftover inventory? And so we began the
process...
If you want to read the cases for yourself, you can find
them all at http://www.microscope.com/archive.htm
What we discovered over the past several months was
interesting:
1) In most cases, the guest media planners were unfamiliar
with any sort of targeting technology. Some came from the
"buy the top 25" school of thought. Others came from "buy
the cheapest available" school of thought. But relatively
few really had an understanding of the targeting and
filtering technology available to them. This is not a knock
at them. It's more a statement that we as an industry need
to get up to speed.
2) In most cases, the kind of "targeting" that media
planners preferred to use was search engine based keywords
and keyphrases. That, and site selection. One of the biggest
challenges we faced is that on the major search engines
(LookSmart and AltaVista in this case), many of the
desirable keywords were chewed up by major companies who did
buys 12 months out. In one case, a media planner tried to
choose a particular keyword that her own company had bought
up the inventory for, which minimized the value of her
Microscope campaign.
3) For those who chose to really pull the levers, weeding
out the non -.com extensions, weeding out internationals for
US only products, focusing on this or that -- when they got
TOO targeted, the available inventory was miniscule so they
had to rework their whole plan. I personally had that
experience in a test run I did before doing the Microscope
launch. So the lesson we learned was that we needed to pick
out one or two targeting/filtering criteria, do the best we
could on site and keyword selection, and hope for the best.
4) There are several of the targeting criteria that have
minimal value. Like browser type. And I would also add
(unless you are selling software) operating system. 97% of
the people are using Windows 95, so how is that targeting?
If I were selling Mac software (were I a masochist), I'd
definitely opt for Mac only targeting. But outside of that,
it's not terribly useful. There are also targeting criteria
for area codes, which are based around the assumption that
people use local ISPs. Unfortunately, most of the tracking
reports show a preponderance of people from Vienna, VA (home
of AOL).
5) There was very little usage of time of day, day of week
targeting, which I think will be very useful to certain
online businesses like lunch delivery services, all night
food delivery, etc. Especially when you can REALLY target
locale.
There is more that could be added here, but I'll leave it at
that. Suffice to say, the industry itself needs to get a
better understanding of the tools available and the impact
they have on your results. It's not a matter of the jury
being out. It's that the trial hasn't even begun.
Andy
-------------------------------------------
Andrew Bourland, Publisher
The ClickZ Network
ClickZ: http://www.clickz.com
Executive Summary: http://www.x-summary.com
Microscope: http://www.microscope.com
Who's Marketing Online? http://www.wmo.com
ZCommerce: http://www.zcommerce.com
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