I’ve been watching with guarded excitement as programmatic advertising and retargeting seem to be improving by leaps and bounds. It amazes me how ad networks can consistently find the right people to advertise to–it borders on the miraculous to someone like me, who grew up in a time where every piece of media was mass media. They hardly knew who you were or what you wanted.
But as amazing as it is to see the pinpoint targeting of ads to bring people to your website, I am flummoxed by the complete lack of understanding of those same people should they actually click on an ad. We targeted bald, one-eyed accountants with the ad, but when some of them clicked through to our site, we served them all the same content anyone else would get who landed on those pages. We had no idea who those people are that we painstakingly targeted.
It’s corporate amnesia. Whatever we knew when we showed the ad, we forgot when we showed the resulting page.
It’s a sad fact that ad networks know far more about their clients’ customers than their clients do. These fabulous tactics that reveal interests, web history, demographics, geography, and more are mostly unavailable to website developers whose code displays the pages on your site.
The ad networks choose from thousands of ads in realtime to show the best one to that person, When they click through on your website, they see the same offers that everyone else does.
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can use many of the same techniques the ad networks do on your own website–if you’re unwilling to settle for what everyone else does.
