The president/creative director for Basement Inc. highlights results from the behavioral targeting element of a campaign, and provides insights as to why BT works.
Advertising's concept of targeting has almost always been focused on content type. Content type, backed by reader and viewer demographics, has provided the most accurate way to get the right message in front of the right person-- mainly because we had no way of knowing where else in the mediascape any reader or viewer had gone before.
Enter behavioral targeting, one more example of how technology is bringing fundamental shifts to this industry.
Recently I had the opportunity to take 24/7 Real Media's BT tool, OnTarget, out for a test drive. Through iMediaConnection, we published a series of articles titled Open Source Marketing, going through a product launch for an actual startup CPG product, Sugarshots liquid sugar.
I won't re-hash the entire 25-article series here, but the broad stroke is we explored ways to use the tracking technologies of online advertising to show that they can not only be used for near-term optimization, but also for long-term marketing intelligence-- finding out what your customers want from you, in ways that can impact everything from ad messages to site content to product development. You can view the series here.
Our CPG example, Sugarshots, was a brand new brand in a new product category, liquid sugar. So there was a lot of product marketing information the company didn't know, and a lot of category information they couldn't have known.
Our tests were designed to help them quickly gather valuable information about their product and its users.
Target audience tests
The tests covered a range of product marketing strategy issues. One test in particular attempted to determine the most receptive target audience for this new brand in a new product category.
We tested for gender preferences between male and female target audiences. And, considering the product's subtle health benefits and brand personality potential, we also tested for health and entertainment content channels.
One area in which the results were particularly interesting was in regards to targeting women.
Review Chart 1 below for reference:
Chart 1
| Performance by Channel: | |
| Channel | Visits per 1000 imp |
| Entertainment | 0.30 |
| Health | 0.29 |
| Men's Interest | 0.13 |
| Women's Interest | 0.07 |
(NOTE: About the metric visits per 1,000 impressions: It's a response rate based on the metric of site visits per 1,000 impressions. This metric is similar to the clickthrough rate, only more accurate because it's based on actual site visits.)
You can see that when it comes to content, the Women's channel was the weakest performer among the four.
Now let's bring in behavioral targeting. We selected two behavioral categories, Health and Women's Interest, and also had a control group with no behavioral targeting.
Here are the results for the same ads and responses above, but split along the behavioral groups instead of content channels.
Chart 2
| Performance by BT segments: | |
| Segment | Visits per 1000 imp |
| Health | 0.23 |
| Women's Interest | 0.22 |
| Static (control) | 0.16 |
You can see that by slicing the data according to behavioral targeting, the Women's group rises to perform on par with Health, one of the top content channel categories. The performance lift between the Women's content channel (.07 percent) and the Women's behavioral segment (.22 percent) is quite substantial.
Next, we'll take a closer view of how the various behavioral segments performed within different content channels. Chart 3 shows the Women's content channel and the Entertainment content channel-- the two channels in which our Women's BT received enough impressions to reach statistical significance.
Chart 3
| The combined result: | |
| Channel/Segment | Visits per 1000 imp |
| Entertainment/Health | 0.41 |
| Entertainment/Women's Interest | 0.39 |
| Entertainment/Static | 0.11 |
| Health/Static | 0.29 |
| Women/Health | 0.05 |
| Women/Static | 0.10 |
| Women/Women | 0.06 |
We can see that for our female target, BT gives us a performance lift from .06 percent to .39 percent when going from the Women's content channel to the Women's behavioral segment. It's noteworthy that the Static (Control) behavior group is almost identical across the two different channels.
These results are not limited to this campaign, either. In fact, 24/7 Real Media reports this type of activity happening on a number of other campaigns last year, as well.
In addition to providing additional clues for ongoing optimization, these findings also present an interesting insight into how advertising works.
Next: Why behavioral targeting works & a glimpse into the future. Page 2 of 2