A recent study conducted by BL Labs, the research arm of ad network BlueLithium, revealed some surprising information regarding behavioral ads and their performances in context and out of context.
After looking at more than 400 million impressions and analyzing click-through rates (CTR) and action taken after the first click, or action-through rates (ATR) across various behavioral segments and contextual groups, BL Labs found that although ads shown in context had higher CTR in seven of the nine categories, ads shown in different contexts had higher ATR in five of the nine categories.
What does this mean?
“As a top-line recommendation for advertisers, if your goal is traffic, use behavioral targeting in context. If your goal is conversion, use behavioral targeting out of context,” said Dakota Sullivan, BlueLithium’s CMO.
ATR for behavioral ads shown in a different context was 19% higher than those of ads shown in the same context.
An example of this is the “shoppers” category, which received the highest CTR from ads on career sites, and the highest ATR from female-oriented Web sites.
Another is the “travelers” category, which received the highest CTR from ads on food sites, and the highest ATR from career sites.
“Given these variations, it is important to not rely solely on pre-packaged audience segments and automated rules-based targeting, but also on custom segmentation and expert, human data analyses to maximize the performance of a behavioral campaign,” the press release said.
“Marketers need to think twice before acting on a knee-jerk reaction to advertise in-context,” said Dave Zinman, SVP of products at BlueLithium.
Essentially, this information indicates that advertisers and marketers need to be a little more creative if they want the biggest bang for their buck. The logic behind these contextual oddities is clear enough with a little bit of creative gumption and some out-of-context thinking.
Sources:
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=172524
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623685
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-
20061016ThinkingOutsideTheContextForAdTargeting.html
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