Behavioral targeting ... Actors and techniques are multiplying

Behavioral targeting marketing is probably one of the most interesting things to follow.

Social networkds and technological actors have sharpened their tools and promised a CTR multiplied by two or three ... so interesting.

To understand the issues and identify the actors, take a look at this article from Neteco.

February, 8th Neteco "Advertising rediscovers the socio-demographic targeting" by Jérôme Bouteiller

There are nearly eight years, the company DoubleClick Inc., specializing in advertising servers, sparked an outcry among netizens for having planned to exploit the socio-demographic data collected on those servers to better target messages from its advertisers. However, due to the outcries of civil libertarians, the company had abandoned its plans .

From contextual targeting to behavioral targeting.

Probably smarting from this episode, large groups of advertising such as Google or Yahoo have since focused on another form of targeting: the editorial context. Now part of the Yahoo group, the company Overture, for example, invented the system of sponsored links that appear in the pages of response from search engines. A contextual advertising system with advanced adWords then expanded the content of web pages with Google AdSense banners.

Although this "contextual" advertising is a great success, generating alone more than $ 15 billion in revenue for Google only, new players intend to exploit the new socio-demographic data of users in order to improve ad targeting and provide better "click rate" and more generally a better return on investment for advertisers.

Whether sociodemographic or behavioral, these targeting techniques seek to display advertisements having affinity with age, gender, interests or behavior of a user. Thanks to their bases of several million profiles, social networks like MySpace or Facebook offer such advertisers to target only people matching their expectations. Called HyperTargeting at MySpace or Social Ads in Facebook, these programs don't display any more advertisements based on the content of a web page but according to the profile of the user. According to Myspace, the performance of their campaigns would just triple.

Different forms of targeting

Limited to only users of these social networks, these solutions are, however, dependent on the data provided by them. "Do you think that women report their true age? Don't men impersonate women in these social networks? A student who had reported earning more than € 100,000 a year for fun to impress friends, he will receive advertisements for flights in first class and 5 star hotels. The true behavioral targeting has to cross methodologies for profiling Internet users. The reported data must be verified by surf data, search, clicks on banners, statistics, panel and audience analysis tools, questionnaires sent to users .... The real behavioral targeting is done with complex algorithms and not with a simplistic solution based on reported data. "nuance Alain Sanjaume, Director of wunderloop France.

Wunderloop, a geman origin company, is now one of the most innovative companies in terms of behavioral targeting. Competing against BlueLitihium , bought by Yahoo, or even Tacoda, acquired by AOL, it multiplied partnerships in recent months, including with Smart AdServer, French leader in the management of banners preceding a certain DoubleClick ... Like its competitors, wunderloop relies particularly on cookies, these small computer files stored in the browser on the hard drive of a user and to collect some behavioral data while theoretically ignore those for the identification (name, address , email, IP address ...) of the user.

In the shadow of these international giants, France has also some behavioral targeting specialists. Long known for its rankings of webmasters, Weborama for example has a particularly efficient technology in this area. "Through our network of 60,000 webmasters, we formed a MegaPanel of 300 000 users profiles, we then extrapolated using statistical and mathematical models for all 22 million profiles of our Woudstats base. This allows us to better target users for example by displaying banners for different products, depending on whether the user is a "man CSP +" or "household under 50 years." "explained last spring Alain Levy, CEO of Weborama, a company that has also just buy C-Marketing specialist behavioral targeting.

Faced with these companies combining personal data and statistical analysis, however, other companies from France are exploring other ways to better target users. "We do not rely on sociotypes which can cause problems of respect for privacy. Our technology is based on the analysis of the course of thousands of users and allows gains on conversion rate of nearly 40%, "explains Jean-Baptise example Rudelle, CEO of Criteo, the company relies on its widgets broadcasted on thousands of blogs to refine its analysis.

Microsoft and Google in ambush

Outre Yahoo et AOL, ces technologies capables d'augmenter de manière significative les taux de clic des internautes ne laissent toutefois pas indifférents de grands noms de l'internet. Microsoft par exemple vient tout juste de dévoiler les dernières innovations de son AdLab. La firme de Redmond annonce ainsi le lancement imminent du ciblage socio demographique en attendant le ciblage comportemental, basé sur les centaines de millions de Windows Live Profils utilisés dans Hotmail, Messenger ou Spaces...

Besides Yahoo and AOL, these technologies that can significantly increase the click through rate (CTR) of users, however, do not leave indifferent big names in the internet. Microsoft for example has just unveiled its latest innovations AdLab. The Redmond company is announcing the imminent launch of socio demographic targeting pending behavioral targeting, based on hundreds of millions of profiles used in Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces ...

"We believe that technological advances and intelligence we create in AdCenter laboratories can change the rules of the game in online advertising. Solutions must be able to manage and understand the complexity of large amounts of data. To face these challenges, we are developing advertising algorithms that can anticipate and understand consumer behavior, "said Tarek Najm, technical responsible at Microsoft.

Same interest from Google, whose blog dedicated to AdWords has announced the opening of a pilot for a better demographic targeting. "You can modify your bids to reach a specific audience like males of 25 to 34 years old or otherwise excluding socio demographic groups that do not allow you to achieve your goals for return on investment," says Google, which initially limited the program to the US and UK markets waiting to expand its program to all of its customers and those of its new subsidiary DoubleClick, which thus marks his return to this controversial field.

Wunderloop, MySpace, Facebook, Google, Microsoft ... after years of relative obscurity, behavioral targeting seems to become an important topic in the world of interactive marketing. It remains to be seen whether the warnings of associations like the French CNIL which are concerned about the use of personal data, weigh heavily against the prospect of tripling or quadrupling the CTR. "