Imagine that you have a blender to sell. However, you choose to have this blender sold only in Target stores because you think the customers in Target will most likely buy your blender. Consequently, by being too narrow with your distribution, you miss out on sales that could have come from customers shopping at Wal-Mart, Kohl’s or other discount chains. Online advertisers sometimes make the same mistake of targeting an audience too narrowly, whether through a network, exchange or marketplace. This can result in poor delivery, poor performance and unhappy advertisers.
One rule of thumb to follow is if you are buying an audience segment from a data provider, make sure you have the broadest site list possible. The notion of audience segment targeting is based on the idea that we have a very strong idea of who the end-user is. If that’s the case, then site targeting should always be as broad as possible, and it shouldn’t matter where the user is as long as we deliver the ad to him/her. For example, going after In-Market Luxury Auto Shoppers in just auto content will likely not yield the best performance results (whether performance is measured on brand awareness, increasing purchase intent or driving sales). Typically, Auto channel content reaches a very small percentage of users and because of small reach, performance tends to be poor.
Viewers in Q4 must have been hungry! Perhaps advertisers from other industries can their cue from restaurant brands, as they had the highest completion rates on their video ads in Q4 2011. On the other end of the spectrum, entertainment advertisers sacrificed some completions for a few more clicks, demonstrating the highest click-through rate in Q4. This is an interesting trend: As more content becomes available via the internet, click-throughs have become a more vital call to action for entertainment ads.
