What's success?
While it's typical to rely on numeric measures to articulate success or failure of an advertising campaign and the tactics deployed for it, sometimes those aren't always meaningful when determining behaviorally targeted media success or failure.
Behaviorally targeted media is itself a result of decision engines that must rely on an imperfect array of assumptions about what a machine-readable action, a single datum, signifies about the agent of action. That is, does a click by a guy on an automotive ad that is shown to him on a travel site -- shown to him because in the past seven days that guy visited five different pages relating to travel or that had travel-like content on them -- mean anything at all? Maybe it's just a click?
"As an industry, we are way too focused on clickthrough rates, and that type of thinking does not necessarily apply to behavioral targeting," notes Regina Sebring, vice president, channel management for Revenue Science.
Though at the same time, it is possible that when a person clicks on a behaviorally targeted ad, the advertiser can deduce that the clicker is already interested in whatever is being advertised. Behavioral targeting ostensibly eliminates the random clickers who might end up aggregated into a standard CTR. But a simple numeric focus doesn't allow for the kind of read of data one needs to commit in order to properly assess if a behavioral targeting tactic works or not. The approach ignores the same method of correlative interpretations that went into constructing a behavioral profile in the first place.
Sebring continues, "Just looking at CTRs is the wrong metric. When advertisers use behavioral targeting, they need to evaluate the campaign results from a holistic standpoint and not just their average CTR."
So, then, what else should you look at when determining the efficacy of behavioral targeting tactics?
