Effective Online Target Marketing

From the perspective of the consumer it's too much. The clutter of ads popping up everywhere when you're on a site. There are banners, floaters, and many others. From a marketing standpoint it's easy to understand the process. How do you get the most important information in front of the user? Easy, place it where he has no other choice but to look at. This process replicated time and again by the multitude of marketers can lead to over saturation.

So the discussion becomes how do you target an audience effectively? The answer, it depends on the goal of the campaign. In a study conducted by TACODA and Next Century Media, contextual targeting (based off of subject interest) and behavioral targeting (specific group identification) should not be used interchangeably.

So if the goal is to launch new messages, ads based on specific subjects worked best, but if the message already has a sturdy foundation behavioral targeting can help sustain the campaign.

With this being said, marketers need to stay afloat of what consumers are researching and where they are going on the Web. The use of web analytics can be a huge support to help track consumers and help marketers form and place better, more effective marketing campaigns.

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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.