07/06/2010

What % of ad impressions are you seeing consumed by existing relationships?

Filed under: 1st party,CRM,Retargeting,Targeting — James Sandoval @ 6:16 pm

Relationships can be defined as:

- A thin “relationship” between a brand/advertiser and its audience on a campaign consumption basis (simply, has seen or has been exposed to a digital marketing comms initiative).

- A slightly richer “relationship” between a brand/advertiser and its audience where not only is there campaign consumption, but there is also interaction and campaign destion visitation (no transacting yet).

- And, as a simple 3rd example, a “relationship” between a brand/advertiser and its audience where there is ad campaign consumption, interaction and subsequent customer transaction value. In this instance, the customer reached by an online display ad campaign could very well be a loyal, valuable, multi-year, multi-transaction customer.

It is the last segment of campaign audience that interests me greatest.

It is this last segment that, I’m learning, is accounting for a greater share of online display ad campaign consumption, but what is typically the messaging strategy for online display campaigns?

It’s not EVER retention-oriented.

Why?

Because, despite the rise and rise of behavioural targeting and retargeting (via ad networks, exchanges, etc), it is simply NOT possible to message to existing relationships in a meaningful way. Today’s methods to retarget [customers/prospects] based on 1×1 pixel data, which only captures content consumption behaviour data, is still guesswork effectively.

So, back to the question:

What % of ad impressions are you seeing consumed by existing relationships?

James

PS. If you’re interested, reach out to me for a POV re: how internet advertising is failing advertisers, their agencies, publishers and, broadly, the industry [partly] due to fundamental/structural “3rd party” ad management platform limitations plus the cottage industry of ad networks, ad exchanges and “demand side” platforms, which are all effectively built on top, perpetuating the flow of valuable data out of advertisers’ enterprises and into “3rd parties”, which create an unnecessary cap on an extraordinary value opportunity.

Note: See the original post on my LinkedIn Group “Digital Ad Targeting Innovation”, with 6 comments, here: http://bit.ly/2e6kFC

18/04/2010

Examples of tagging for targeting – Capital One & British Airways

Filed under: Targeting — Tags: , , — James Sandoval @ 7:18 pm

See the guts of their “tagging for targeting” practices via the links below:

Screenshots of http requests via Firefox’s Tamper Data Add-On:

.txt files containing the contents of the container tags each advertiser is using on their respective homepages:

I’m finding it quite interesting to see AppNexus, Invite Media, MediaMath and others are now actively being used in the UK market.

I’m also finding is quite interesting that the number of 3rd party/media and/or data supplier tags used by these, and other, advertisers is growing quite quickly.

I’ll publish some growth stats in the coming weeks (as I’ve been watching and recording developments quite regularly over the past 1.5 years).

Note: While I have reservations re: the online advertising’s development of “tagging for targeting” practices, which you can learn about via some of my previous posts to this forum, the purpose of this post is to stimulate idea generation & exchange.

To help get that going, here are a couple of questions:

  • How does writing 10+ media partners’ data tags affect campaign performance? Are we talking about 2x, 10x,100x performance lifts?
  • How, if at all, does this aggressive type of “tagging for targeting” affect “conversion attribution” analyses and reporting, a commonly discussed challenge in the industry today?
  • How are advertisers coming to the decision that writing 10, 20 or more 1×1 pixels and/or other container tags to web site customer touchpoints makes business sense? How do they view the trade-off between the transfer of thousands, if not millions, of visitor/customer behaviour and other data points out of their enterprises and online advertising ROI?

Ok. That’s it for now.

Happy thinking. Happy Easter.

James

If “customer state” was a targeting option for your paid search advertising programmes, what would you do?

Filed under: Targeting — Tags: — James Sandoval @ 7:16 pm

Customer state would be determined by one or more values in the advertiser’s own domain [cookie] data.

For example, if the advertiser is a telecom, “customer state” i.e. “customer relationship” variables that might be managed in its [cookie] data might include:

  • an ID that represents lifetime value score
  • an ID that represents customer segment (based on the advertiser’s customer database, not AudienceScience or a publisher/ad network’s database)
  • an ID that represents handset
  • an ID that represents contract type e.g. pay as you go, monthly, etc
  • a date that represents contract start
  • a date that represents contract expiration

In the event you’re unclear where this is headed, when this information is available in an advertiser’s own domain data (increasingly common), the data is not only available for immediate referencing at the point of the paid search ad click, it is also available for real-time ad targeting (although not in the context of paid search advertising…yet).

Now, I’ve proposed this idea to a number of media agencies and advertisers over the past 12+ months and this is what I’ve gathered:

  • Most advertisers would rather NOT target i.e. spend money on paid search advertising that reaches/targets existing customers i.e. existing relationships. Said another way, if given the choice, advertisers (the small handful with whom I spoke about this; not a statistically valid sample) would effectively opt out of targeting existing customer relationships via paid search programmes.

Given that the vast majority of advertisers have been trained to view paid search via Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! as a vehicle for customer acquisition (not up-sell/cross-sell, retention, etc) it’s no surprise that the [gut] reaction I got was to cut the cost of reaching existing customer relationships [they might transact again without the aid of paid search ads].

But, get this, many advertisers admitted they were aware that, in some cases, a very large percentage of their paid search ad clicks, costs and subsequent transactions were mapped to existing customers.

So, the question again:

If “customer state” was a targeting option for your paid search advertising, what would you do?

Would you tailor your paid search ads to “speak” with your existing “relationships” with a new and arguably valuable relevance or would you choose not advertise to existing “relationships” via paid search programmes at all.

Note: Please keep in mind that, as far as I know, customer “state” based targeting is NOT available via paid search advertising today. It IS available via display advertising, which, if you’re interested, you can ask me about.

James
Founder & Managing Director
Invizua Limited

Invizua is a digital marketing accountability company.

“Tagging for targeting” – is the dissemination of advertisers’ valuable customer behaviour data to the very suppliers from which they are buying access to eyeballs worth it?

Filed under: Targeting — Tags: , — James Sandoval @ 7:11 pm

The hack that I call tagging for targeting, whereby an advertiser (or its agency) will write DoubleClick Floodlight, Criteo or other 1×1 pixel container tags to multiple customer touchpoints on an advertiser’s web site (or other digital media…including ads), and then stuff those [container] tags with ad network, ad exchange and other sell-side tags (yes, it gets confusing…and this is just the beginning) is a practice that is increasingly worrying advertisers.

And rightly so.

The customer behaviour data that leaves advertisers’ organisation as a result of “tagging for targeting” may well be worth more than the limited ROI.

I believe advertisers’ customer behaviour data IS more valuable than the ROI they’re currently realising and I think that tagging for targeting is potentially more damaging than good for advertisers’ businesses.

What do you think?

Note: Tagging for targeting is something I’ve practiced for 4+ years for many Fortune 1,000/FTSE 100 advertisers, starting with aQuantive’s DrivePM back in 2003/2004 when their Selector product was in early beta stages.

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