"Fishing From a Barrel" author Rob Graham explains how to put the right ads in front of the right people.
In "Fishing From a Barrel" author and professor Rob Graham has one message for his readers: Know your customers.
The book, then, to paraphrase Graham, is an attempt to draw a roadmap that aids online advertisers and publishers in understanding the process of planning behaviorally targeted (BT) ad initiatives.
The target
"To be effective in the new world, advertisers have to stop targeting 'us' and start targeting 'me,'" Graham writes. The beauty of BT, Graham argues, is that it allows publishers and advertisers to learn more about their customers not as group, but as individuals.
Rather, than sifting through mountains of data meant to encapsulate the buying patterns of groups of people, Graham sees BT as a way to look into the minds of a single, potential customer.
"By recognizing and tracking the surfing behaviors of individual site visitors, publishers are able to plot patterns of behavior that identify specific areas of interest, current needs and buying intention," Graham writes.
While it is the publishers who must set up their websites to gather information, much the same way a retail store would instruct a clerk to observe a customer's in-store behavior, it is both advertisers and publishers who gain from BT, according to Graham.
In a hypothetical example featuring "Jerry," a busy consumer in the market for mountain biking vacations, Graham explains how tracking each visit made by the consumer to a relevant website, and subsequently serving ads targeted to where Jerry is in the buying cycle, yields positive results for publishers, advertisers and consumers.
By knowing precisely where Jerry was in the buying cycle, the publisher can sell ads at a premium because they cater to the right buyer. And by putting ads in front of a likely buyer, the advertiser wins because relevant ads are better able to convert. As an added benefit, Graham points out that Jerry will benefit because relevant ads help him save time finding what he wants, thus building a stronger relationship between advertiser and consumer.
Next: Data matters, a lot
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