NAI Study: Double Your Display Ad Effectiveness With Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral Targeting (BT) is the name given to the techniques that serve custom display ads to people that meet certain criteria - people that have visited a certain website or type of website get one ad, and other who have different behavioral history in their browser history get a different ad.  BT techniques tailor the message and creative for a specific purpose: targeted display ads are more effective.

The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) has released a study that spells out the greater effectiveness - it's about twice as effective as display ads that aren't targeted.

Effectiveness is measured in the conversion rate that a click produces - the percentage of clickers who perform some kind of action - fill out a form, create a piece of content - whatever.  To see how conversion rates figure into  a media buy, check out my post on knowing your economic model and run some numbers!

Criticism of behaviorally targeted ads by consumers, privacy advocates and the government has led to uncertainty in the market, which eMarketer expects to reach nearly $1.13 billion this year. Research from the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) indicates the high value of those ads, for both marketers and publishers.

The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad. Clickers found behavioral ads more relevant, but the NAI did not study how likely they were to click in the first place, a key component of effectiveness.