Americans are ok with it. Europeans have strong trepidation
about it. No it is not about stimulus
package or the massive global, invasive surveillance program.
It is literally about the “cookies fight” or online profiling
to enable finely targeted ads…
You agree to barter your personal information and browsing
behavior for free access to content and well-timed ads. While we, on this side
of the pond, accept the implicit blurring of lines between being a “consumer”
and a “product”, our brethren, on the other side, balk at the idea. And they have tightened the cover of “cookies
jar” (pardon the pun!).
This message prompts you when you visit any website in UK or European Union!
Massive amount of data and profile patterns have become life-sustaining
nourishment for the digital marketers.
And it is Google, Facebook and
Yahoo that have, undoubtedly, the biggest heaps of “big data”.
Of the three, Google has the most advanced advertising
platform. Its AdWords program let marketers determine the search queries and
build the ads that deliver the best performance. However, the ads, once created, are shown to
every individual performing search on those queries, regardless of the
demographic profile or the search intent.
You can, of course, set up separate campaigns for each geography, or
resort to day parting. But if you are running a large campaign, such slicing
very soon becomes major and expensive headache.
Targeting can go deep(er)
Since Google has amassed petabytes (soon to become exabyte
or even zettabyte) of data on individuals, it would be relatively easy for them
to develop fairly accurate profiles (demographic including information like occupation,
station in life and so on) of its users.
Now, if an avid AdWords marketer has the ability to develop multiple ad-creatives and target to the desired user profiles, it should not be too difficult
for the search giant to match and present the most relevant ads.
It is easy to see that such ads will attract
relatively more clicks (pushing up the click-thru-rates or the CTR). And if the
marketer is savvy enough to direct users to well designed landing pages, the
Quality Score of the campaign can go up, reducing the cost of acquiring traffic
and increasing the satisfaction all around.
To be fair Facebook has demographic targeting but you will
need to set up multiple campaigns if you want the message to be differentiated. Google's display network does offer some flexibility in targeting, but everyone knows that their search campaign delivers better results. Bing sports age and gender targeting, but as Search Engine Land reported, decided to remove the exclusivity citing
“inaccuracy” in data and lack of volume!
It is apparent that digital marketing technology is moving from
generic to specific…very specific!
Maybe it is just a question of time.
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