This is a summary of the article by Anca Micu, called How Did This Ad Get in my Browser? A Theoretical Examination of Online Targeting and Segmentation Practices as they Relate to Media Planning on the Internet. You can read the original behavioral targeting article here: How Did This Ad Get in my Browser?
People who wish to communicate their market use targeting to have more accurate message deliveries and not waste any coverage towards audiences which are not interested in buying their products anyway. These people, therefore, need to have a considerable amount of knowledge regarding their audiences.
Planning for an Effective Medium
One strategy that needs to be implemented knows what kind of tools they need to implement for a certain group of people that are highly likely to purchase their products or services. There are a lot of things to consider here, such as the frequency of using a tool, or vehicle, towards a certain targeted audience, or the budget that largely determines which tools to use and how often they are used in the first place.
As time goes by, more and more companies are using the internet as an integral part of their marketing media strategy. The way they use the internet as a marketing medium is largely similar to what Bergen, et al (2003) calls as directed towards “customer space”. This simply means that the focus of internet marketing is towards the customers. Specifically, the full realization of internet marketing as an effective tool is upheld when the following strategies are incorporated.
3 Key Strategies for Customer Space Internet Marketing
The first key strategy is to only target the segments which are profitable. The second strategy is to use the brand value leverage to its full maximum. Finally, the third strategy is to give the impression that the brand is highly relevant to the customer’s life, through awareness and finding ways to build a solid relationship with your customers.
As an example, consider the contrasting strategies between Pantene and American Airlines. Pantene advertised ‘6 signs of healthy hair’ online through polls in which 2.5 million people responded, while American Airlines used large format and rich media ads containing customer testimonials, directed towards a specific group of business travelers. The latter is highly specified and aimed at a more interested audience than that of Pantene’s audience.
Simplified CPM Scheme for New Media Planning
Cannon (2001) proposed a simplified scheme for effective evaluation of alternative media vehicles. Although this evaluation scheme is a general scheme for alternative vehicles, it can be seen that it fits the internet media vehicle significantly. In this scheme, the interplaying variables are first, cost of distributing the message, second, the targeted audience, and third, exposure effectiveness.
For internet marketing, the first interplaying variable, message distribution cost, can be the cost of maintaining a website for a particular brand, as well as buying the Internet media. The second variable, or targeted audience, refers to the users who visit the web site of the brand. The third variable, or the effectiveness of web exposure, is the measure of whether the users who visit the website will respond to the advertisements they will see.
Choosing the Right Audience
How do you choose the right audience for your brand? Several methods are introduced by several people. For example, Bhat, Bevans and Sengupta (2002) introduced an evaluation of the activity of web users so that advertising will be enhanced. Their method is composed of five metrics. The first one is Exposure evaluation. Second is Stickiness evaluation. Third is Content Usefulness evaluation. Fourth is Co-marketing Success evaluation, and fifth is Targeting Efficiency evaluation.
The same group also introduces three metrics to measure the effectiveness of audience targeting. The first measure is called Composition. The second is global geographic overview. Finally, the third is observed profiling. Composition is a metric which outputs the kind of demographics or groups of users that respond to an ad, and gets the percentage of those groups. Global geographic overview is done by checking the domain of a user’s IP address, and observer profiling uses cookies to track the behavior of a user.