Data 101: Targeting Display

Frankly, despite my admiration for Dave and his work, I don’t think he had it quite right. The industry is muddied with companies trying to assign meaning to specific behaviors and the level of detail they engage to examine all of these data points is, at times, overwhelming.

Despite all of the available technologies to enhance digital marketing, and the plethora of opportunities in online advertising, off-line still seems to work much better. This may be a bold claim coming from someone that has founded a search retargeting company, but let’s look at this closer. If you look at my laptop and you look at my girlfriend’s laptop, you’ll see basically the same emails and the same display advertisements.

However, if you look in the mailbox at my house and then in my girlfriend’s mailbox, you’ll find that we’re being served totally different catalogues and direct mail.  Not only does the content we receive offline differ more significantly between each individual, it actually maps to the customer’s current stage of life. This means that as shopping habits evolve from Abercrombie & Fitch to J. Crew to Banana Republic to Diesel to Prada, so, too, do the mailers we receive at our homes.

Offline targeting, which in its most basic form simply sends catalogues to past customers or past customers of related companies, works amazingly well. And, at the new data exchanges, we are following this same approach—combining the most basic and reliable online information (search data) to target in-market shoppers or interested potential clients.

The new targeting methods simply show ads to people that previously visited your site (site retargeting) or show ads to people that previously searched for a product (data targeting). This is a departure from the previous generation of behavioral targeting companies that look at thousands of pieces of data per user per month.

We keep it simple, and effective. We show car rental ads to people that previously searched for “car rental.” Sometimes logic wins over hype, in terms of  efficacy and on the bottom line.