Targeted advertising


Targeted 'advertising or data-driven marketing' is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.
These traits can either be demographic with a focus on race, economic status, sex, age, generation, level of education, income level, and employment, or psychographic focused on the consumer values, personality, attitude, opinion, lifestyle, and interests. This focus can also entail behavioral variables, such as browser history, purchase history, and other recent online activities. While efficient for advertisers, the practice has raised concerns regarding privacy and algorithmic bias, which critics argue can lead to unintended discrimination or the marginalization of specific groups.
Traditional forms of advertising, including billboards, newspapers, magazines, and radio channels, are progressively becoming replaced by online advertisements.
Through the emergence of new online channels, the usefulness of targeted advertising is increasing because companies aim to minimize wasted advertising. Most targeted new media advertising currently uses second-order proxies for targets, such as tracking online or mobile web activities of consumers, associating historical web page consumer demographics with new consumer web page access, using a search word as the basis of implied interest, or contextual advertising.

Types

Companies have technology that allows them to gather information about web users. By tracking and monitoring what websites users visit, internet service providers can directly show ads that are relative to the consumer's preferences. Most of today's websites are using these targeting technologies to track users' internet behavior and there is much debate over the privacy issues present.

Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing uses search engines to reach target audiences. For example, Google's Remarketing Campaigns are a type of targeted marketing where advertisers use the IP addresses of computers that have visited their websites to remarket their ad specifically to users who have previously been on their website whilst they browse websites that are a part of the Google display network, or when searching for keywords related to a product or service on the Google search engine. Dynamic remarketing can improve targeted advertising as the ads can include the products or services that the consumers have previously viewed on the advertisers' websites within the ads.
Google Ads includes different platforms. The Search Network displays the ads on 'Google Search, other Google sites such as Maps and Shopping, and hundreds of non-Google search partner websites that show ads matched to search results'. 'The Display Network includes a collection of Google websites, partner sites, and mobile sites and apps that show adverts from Google Ads matched to the content on a given page.'
These two kinds of advertising networks can be beneficial for each specific goal of the company, or type of company. For example, the search network can benefit a company to reach consumers actively searching for a particular product or service.
Other ways advertising campaigns can target the user is to use browser history and search history. For example, if the user types promotional pens into a search engine such as Google, ads for promotional pens will appear at the top of the page above the organic listings. These ads will be geo-targeted to the area of the user's IP address, showing the product or service in the local area or surrounding regions. The higher ad position is often rewarded to the ad having a higher quality score. The ad quality is affected by the 5 components of the quality score:
When ranked based on these criteria, it will affect the advertiser by improving ad auction eligibility, the actual cost per click, ad position, and ad position bid estimates; to summarise, the better the quality score, the better ad position, and lower costs.
Google uses its display network to track what users are looking at and to gather information about them. When a user goes to a website that uses the Google display network, it will send a cookie to Google, showing information on the user, what they have searched, where they are from, found by the IP address, and then builds a profile around them, allowing Google to easily target ads to the user more specifically.
For example, if a user goes onto promotional companies' websites often, that sell promotional pens, Google will gather data from the user such as age, gender, location, and other demographic information as well as information on the websites visited, the user will then be put into a category of promotional products, allowing Google to easily display ads on websites the user visits relating to promotional products.

Social media targeting

Social media targeting is a form of targeted advertising, that uses general targeting attributes such as geotargeting, behavioral targeting, and socio-psychographic targeting, and gathers the information that consumers have provided on each social media platform.
According to the media users' view history, customers who are interested in the criteria will be automatically targeted by the advertisements of certain products or services. For example, Facebook collects massive amounts of user data from surveillance infrastructure on its platforms. Information such as a user's likes, view history, and geographic location is leveraged to micro-target consumers with personalized products.
Paid advertising on Facebook works by helping businesses to reach potential customers by creating targeted campaigns.
Social media also creates profiles of the consumer and only needs to look at one place, the user's profile, to find all interests and 'likes'.
E.g. Facebook lets advertisers target using broad characteristics like gender, age, and location. Furthermore, they allow more narrow targeting based on demographics, behavior, and interests.

Television

Advertisements can be targeted to specific consumers watching digital cable, Smart TVs, or over-the-top video. Targeting can be done according to age, gender, location, or personal interests in films, etc.
Cable box addresses can be cross-referenced with information from data brokers like Acxiom, Equifax, and Experian, including information about marriage, education, criminal record, and credit history. Political campaigns may also match against public records such as party affiliation and which elections and party primaries the view has voted in.

Mobile devices

Since the early 2000s, advertising has been pervasive online and more recently in the mobile setting. Targeted advertising based on mobile devices allows more information about the consumer to be transmitted, not just their interests, but their information about their location and time. This allows advertisers to produce advertisements that could cater to their schedule and a more specific changing environment.

Content and contextual targeting

The most straightforward method of targeting is content/contextual targeting. This is when advertisers put ads in a specific place, based on the relative content present. Another name used is content-oriented advertising, as it corresponds to the context being consumed.
This targeting method can be used across different mediums, for example in an article online, purchasing homes would have an advert associated with this context, like an insurance ad. This is usually achieved through an ad matching system that analyses the contents on a page or finds keywords and presents a relevant advert, sometimes through pop-ups.
Sometimes the ad matching system can fail, as it can neglect to tell the difference between positive and negative correlations. This can result in placing contradictory adverts, which are not appropriate to the content.

Technical targeting

Technical targeting is associated with the user's own software or hardware status. The advertisement is altered depending on the user's available network bandwidth, for example, if a user is on a mobile phone that has a limited connection, the ad delivery system will display a version of the ad that is smaller for a faster data transfer rate.
Addressable advertising systems serve ads directly based on demographic, psychographic, or behavioral attributes associated with the consumer exposed to the ad. These systems are always digital and must be addressable in that the endpoint that serves the ad must be capable of rendering an ad independently of any other endpoints based on consumer attributes specific to that endpoint at the time the ad is served.
Addressable advertising systems, therefore, must use consumer traits associated with the endpoints as the basis for selecting and serving ads.

Time Targeting

According to the Journal of Marketing, more than 1.8 billion clients spent a minimum of 118 minutes daily- via web-based networking media in 2016. Nearly 77% of these clients interact with the content through likes, commenting, and clicking on links related to content. With this astounding buyer trend, advertisers need to choose the right time to schedule content, to maximize advertising efficiency.
To determine what time of day is most effective for scheduling content, it is essential to know when the brain is most effective at retaining memory. Research in chronopsychology has credited that time-of-day impacts diurnal variety in a person's working memory accessibility and has discovered the enactment of inhibitory procedures to build working memory effectiveness during times of low working memory accessibility. Working memory is known to be vital for language perception, learning, and reasoning providing us with the capacity of putting away, recovering, and preparing quick data.
For many people, working memory accessibility is good when they get up toward the beginning of the day, most reduced in mid-evening, and moderate at night.