Who is delivering the behavioral targeting goods and who is just paying lip service? Underscore Marketing's president shows you how to separate the wheat from the chaff.
There's an annoying tendency in this industry for publishers to latch on to popular concepts like behavioral targeting and develop a token offering so that sales reps can say "Yeah, we got that." when meeting with advertisers and agencies.
Behavioral targeting definitely has its share of "me, too" imitators that stand in stark contrast to companies in the space that are developing robust offerings. Unfortunately, separating the legitimate offerings from the superficial ones requires an advertiser to do a bit of a deep dive on the seller's offering, including the broad strokes of the technology and the sources of the data that feed it. And this might take some time. Given that the better BT solutions can deliver results light-years ahead of the fakers, though, it's time well invested.
Here are some tips for separating the wheat from the chaff:
Ask about recency algorithms
Let's say your client sells motorboats. A rep offers you 250,000 impressions against people who have sought out information on boating sites. What's your next question? That's right: How long ago did they seek out that information?
Especially where considered purchases like boats and cars are concerned, recency has a lot to do with whether or not a BT campaign is successful. It doesn't do the advertiser any good if someone falling into the "considering a boat" bucket got there because they visited boat-related content 18 months ago. Odds are that they've already made a purchase decision and won't be buying another boat for several years.
Regrettably, some BT sellers don't even take recency into account, which means that the likely buyer you want to target is actually an "already bought." Make sure that reps can easily answer questions about how fresh their pool of prospects is, and how often they get rid of the stale ones. Be sure to also ask about how flexible BT sellers can be on matching their recency algorithms so that they're consistent with what you know from your own market research. If your research shows that 70 percent of the people considering your product make a decision within two weeks, getting a lot of people who are four weeks from displaying initial consideration behavior probably doesn't make sense.
Ask about dynamic targeting, too
In our everyday lives, it's likely that we have several different interests simultaneously, and we might be in the market for more than one product at any given time. For instance, if you looked at my surfing behavior, you'd see that I'm in the market for a jewelry gift and a camper at the same time.
Some BT offerings oversimplify this, however, and can assign only one BT bucket to one user at a given time. So to some publishers, I might be a jewelry purchaser but not in the market for a camper, and I might see a ton of jewelry ads but never show up on the radar of a camper dealership.
In this way, BT can be static with respect to segmentation, and this can be quite undesirable since it limits potential reach to perfectly good prospects. Ask your rep to take you through the basics of how their system works, and be sure to ask whether a person can occupy more than one behavioral segment at a time.
Retargeting does not a BT program make
Too often the media planners on our staff ask publishers and networks about their BT programs, only to find out that they're merely retargeting programs and nothing more. In retargeting, publishers tag either an advertiser's site or their creative (or both) and target those who have visited the site or have been exposed to the advertiser's creative with special messages. This is a great behavioral targeting tactic, and it works really well. The problem is, when it comes to BT, retargeting is kind of 100-level, and advertisers want more advanced options.
Retargeting can become quite complicated in the sense that more advanced practitioners will even segment their messaging based on different types of behavior. By way of example, an e-commerce site might offer a 10-percent-off coupon to someone who abandoned a shopping cart in hopes of providing a last-minute sales incentive, but they might serve up an upselling or cross-selling message for someone who did buy.
Sadly, quite a few of the BT fakers try to sell basic retargeting only. Retargeting is only a small subset of BT as a whole, so any seller claiming to be in the BT business with only a basic retargeting offering is a faker.