Avoiding Targeting Myopia

Marketing covers a broad topic of goals such as acquiring new customers, ROI, and improving customer longevity. Once you have defined the goals then you must narrow down how to measure them.

Marketers have been successful in pursuing these goals mainly direct response goals not branding ones through contextual, behavioral, geographic and search online ad targeting. Advertising.com does an ongoing survey of U.S. web publishers and found that in 2005 19.2% of respondents cited that branding was a main objective of advertisers and this year it’s a 41.5% objective.



With such a focus on direct response, marketers may be neglecting other forms of targeting. An emarketer report estimates that behavioral target online ad spending will increase to $1.5 million in 2007. This type of targeting helps marketers get better results from less impressions, and emarketer.com found users prefer this type because it better suits their needs. Of course each type of targeting has its place, so choose wisely but certainly choose more than one approach and focus on engaging the audience.