Targeting Sites vs. Targeting Audiences

I came across a post by Brad Terrell talking about the Appnexus Innovation summit and he highlights the topic of targeting sites vs. targeting audiences.

He goes on to talk about two different ad networks, their differences and gives emerical evidence of his thoughts:

Adam also illustrated the value creation potential of the audience-driven approach to targeting by pointing out how the enterprise value of a representative “old school” ad network, Burst Media, paled in comparison to the much higher enterprise value of a newer “audience-driven” ad network, interCLICK

- Please read the whole post as this could be considered out of context and its worth reading the whole post http://loca.ly/couk6j

So I think about this from a entrepreneur’s perspective and I completely agree. Advertisers and Marketers cling to what is new and there is continual pressure to do a better job and take advantage of the newest technologies and methods possible.

That said, DON’T OVERLOOK SITE TARGETING. Audience targeting if done properly with re-targeting or search keyword re-targeting such as with Magnetic.is can be very powerful and literally spin gold when it comes to bottom of the funnel and making sure you get in-market sales.

Beyond this however lies the ocean of ad impressions that are still being boiled by the likes of the big ad networks and exchanges. I recently had a conversation with the VP of Operations at one of the larges online ad agencies pitching my business and knowing that I used to sell to him I asked, well what do you think I should be buying. He responded, that when you are doing direct response advertising where you need to hit a specific ROI to continue to invest, what you do is buy all of the ad networks and optimize the best you can. He said DSP’s are great for getting that re-targeting audience and a couple other segments but largely a lot of the audiences do not work and there are so many of them that even if there is an optimal audience, you will waste a lot of money trying to find it.

From my experience on the sales side on any given campaign there were 2-3 audiences that really worked on any given campaign (one being re-targeting) and the rest of the heavy lifting was done by site optimization and frequency within site optimization. In fact the most important driver is something that I rarely hear people selling on or creating business models on, which is site frequency and the fact that the first few impressions (1-3) are in fact the most valuable by a long shot. Most publishers know this and technology lends to selling this easily but for some reason it is not sold out there on the open market.

Furthermore there is also a lot of evidence that brand name new sites and mail sites such as LA Times, NY Times, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and others similar create the most ROI impact if bought at the right frequency and attributed properly…..which leads to attribution modeling which is a whole other post which I probably need to write more on. That said, if bought through an ad network or exchange often you get the higher site-frequency impressions and these sites don’t appear to work as well. If bought directly, you have the burden of paperwork and exorbitantly high prices to get access to the right impressions of this media.

So because they have such a broad view of their buys I think a great new frontier for ad networks SSP’s, and DSP’s is to sell based on site-frequency. They have this data and often know where they are in the publisher daisy chain and can aggregate supply across many sites and can efficiently convert this into a fluid buy.

And, I would buy it…..