Many advertisers who are predominantly acquisition focused salivate at the thought of being able to improve their conversion rates and ROI by buying behaviorally targeted media. It’s common sense, for example a car rental client is typically willing to pay a little bit more for impressions that are targeted to “hot prospects”, ones that look like they are ready to rent a car. Seems like a no brain proposition for both the advertiser and the publisher. The publisher yields a bigger profit from their finite inventories, and the advertiser can possibly improve their ROI.
Here is the rub, this is great for the challenger car rental brand with the smaller budget, and it’s deadly dangerous for the dominant brand with the big budget. Consider how the target segments get created. Often the criteria for determining the “Often Rents Cars” or “Interested in Car Rental” universes is anonymous tagging of computers who clicked on rental car ads, or worse rented a car in the last XX days. The first part is based on click tracking of ads that were categorized generically as “car rental”. Imagine that you are the biggest advertiser in this category on this site and you have effectively placed 70% of all the “car rental” ads on this site. Guess what your PROSPECTS are 70% of the so-called anonymous segment that site sells to your competitors. You have just opened the kimono to your competition my friend. The second scenario is even more disturbing because it actually exposes your customers Many big publishers or worse ad networks convince clients to add tracking pixels to their online forms, applications, or booking engines in order to better optimize their media, or to track performance based deals. Now you don’t have to wonder how they can tag a group of people as “Recently rented a Car”.
If you have been following so far and you are the small car rental brand with the small budget you have a huge smile on your face, and if you work at the big bad brand with the big bad budget you are thinking this sucks why cant we take advantage of this cool stuff.
At this point if you are the little guy you can stop reading and go buy more of this stuff. If you are the big guy read on and I will offer some advice on how you can protect yourself.
First of all different publishers use different criteria to build their profiles, you should really ask a lot of questions to really understand your exposure. Ad or affiliate networks can represent a huge part of your pipeline, so avoiding them all together is simply not an option for most with that said I can tell you that these networks happen to be the biggest offenders. Here is what you should consider. There is no getting around exposing who clicks on your ads, but you can significantly minimize the amount of data shared when somebody is or becomes your customer. You can have your IT folks develop a fairly simple homegrown solution to manage third party pixels. The idea is to only trigger the pixel when the source of the traffic comes directly from that network or publisher as opposed to pinging them every single time someone hits that page which is effectively all of your business. If the idea of involving your IT group every time you add a new publisher turns your stomach there are packages out there like our own BridgeTrack® that will allow you to place a single piece of code and virtually daisy chain as many third party pixels as you want without having to ever touch the page again. Frankly I believe the Google - DoubleClick and Microsoft - Atlas deals will take what little control advertisers had and hand it all to the publishers. This is why we need more tools to serve as the “advertisers advocate” this post is only one example of why we should not let the publishers control all the technology.
