Search Marketing Insights (Traditional Advertising + Search)
Behavioral Targeting: Going beyond Rich Media, Display and Search
By: Matt Naeger, Executive VP, Operations
Although surrounded by consumer privacy concerns and lackluster technology and expertise to back up the concept, behavioral targeting still remains to be a hot topic amongst marketers.
The combination of Search and display can be a tactic to find and leverage targeted audiences by yielding an influx of searchers looking for a particular brand or a visible brand driving an increase in searchers. Recent news has indicated that Google might have already ventured into the behavioral targeting arena (re: Behavioural targeting: Not necessarily a bad idea). Although unconfirmed, this could be the push that the industry needs in order to develop an effective behavioral targeting system that delivers more directed advertising to consumers, increasing conversion rates, while gathering relevant consumer information in a transparent manner.
Rich media is starting to evolve as a way to harness behavioral targeting. For example, applets that allow user interaction and special effects can be effective in branding because of its user engagement opportunities.
While targeting, tracking, historical ROI averages (as well as a labor-intensive process to build a campaign) are real challenges to the use of rich media, Google continues to reinvent the way searchers and advertisers use the Internet – perhaps giving rich media its place in the sun.
Google’s arm extends the rich media experience with two innovations – Gadgets and Gadget Ads. Gadgets or “widgets” (as they are often referred) are the base program and offer dynamic content that can be placed on any page on the Web. Gadget Ads, introduced last September, are ad units with interactive, rich media capabilities and allow users to engage with ad content in a way static ads haven’t facilitated in the past.
While their format allows companies to build ads that include audio, video, games, live data feeds, and to incorporate Flash and JavaScript programming languages, resulting in a ‘mini Web page within a Web page’; Google reps tell IMPAQT that a challenge is “building out a Gadget ad because it requires the capability of actually developing a Web site”. However, in a recent site visit by Google, they tell us a Google Gadget Ad template is underway.
The most valuable aspect of the Google ad is its tracking capabilities. Through Google’s interaction tracking, performance (clicks, click-throughs, etc.) of the ads can be monitored and fed back into an advertiser’s Adwords account. Appearing to be the best of both worlds, Gadgets ads are an interactive, engaging medium that provide analytics into visitor behavior which go beyond the rich media experience as they can be distributed via the largest global online ad network and transported to other platforms while being shared with other viewers.
But why should Search Marketers care about rich media and Gadget Ads when they are seemingly at the opposite end of the online advertising spectrum? As recently stated by Jerry Yang in response to the Google/Yahoo advertising deal, “…the convergence of search and display is the next major development in the evolution of the rapidly changing online advertising industry”. This path toward a convergence has left many questions for the Search Marketer to consider such as which practice will govern the overall industry growth – the targeting and direct response efficiencies of Search or the user engagement capabilities of display. So far, Search is leading the online advertising pack accounting for 41 percent of all online ad dollars in 2007 versus 34 percent from display (figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau). But as we know, the Search space is constantly evolving and new, more sophisticated techniques could be just around the corner that bridges the gap between Search and Display and result in an effective and accepted method for behavioral targeting.
