Content-based Targeting or Audience-based Retargeting: Which way to go?
In the past two weeks, I have been bombarded with a rash of advertising from publishers I have had dealings with in the past..
One of them I can not even remember ever having any association with. They all chased me to the Wealthy Affiliate portal via retargeting.
I entered in the Wealthy Affiliate url and pressed Enter. Instead of the WA portal page, I saw a completely different page that had to do with web building. While I need some help with optimizing my website and bringing it at par with some of my competitors’ I have no memory of having contacted this particular organization for help.
I thought I had made a mistake in entering the WA credentials and so I signed out and signed in again. I got the same result…..albeit a different page!
This time it was an online training platform that was charging me 100’s of dollars a month as its affiliate for little or no training in return. We never got to use their flagship tool for building landing pages throughout my three months’ stay. The owners of the platform were still figuring out how to use it and come up with a user manual! The amount I paid for the three months’ worth of training would have paid for my two years’ membership at Wealthy Affiliate.I was surprised because I have not been in contact with this platform in the past two years so this is a clear case of retargeting!
What is Retargeting?
Ad retargeting or remarketing is the marketing process in which you target ads to users who have previously engaged with your website or social media platform and haven’t converted to a sale.
When visitors land on your website, they are tagged with a cookie or pixel. This allows you to earmark and target these people with customized ads wherever they go online.
The Cons of Audience-based Advertising targeting:
Most online marketers retarget former customers because it is inherently easier to sell to a past buyer than a new one. Retargeting allows you to reach an audience that has already expressed an interest in your product but it fails to inform you if this audience is still interested in your product or has moved on. In my case I had moved on to Wealthy Affiliate but my former training platform kept targeting me.
It gave me the eerie feeling that I was being spied on by my former training platform
Retargeting helps you keep track of people who visit your site and display your retargeting ads to them as they visit other sites online. The shortcoming of this type of audience based targeting is that It does not take cognizance of the fact that some people who left your website do not intend to return to make a purchase.
They find your retargeting efforts bothering to them and clearly in violation of the GDPR specifications which demand that the marketer gets the buyer’s consent before retargeting him.
The ePrivacy regulation will go into operation in mid 2020. It is expected to regulate how organizations buy and sell, manage or share data especially third party data in their possession and more importantly, it will restrict the use of cookies to track a user’s browsing history.
Infringement of these regulations will attract steep penalties. Google, the technology behemoth got slapped with a whopping 50 million pounds by CNIL,France for data protection breach!
Compare these drawbacks of an audience-based targeting to the advantages of content-based targeting techniques taught at Wealthy Affiliate
The Pros of Content-based Advertising targeting
Content-based advertising targeting technique is transparent. There is a relationship between advertising and its placement. If there is no relevant content, then there is no advertisement displayed. Visitors appreciate the honesty and would want to buy from people who are trustworthy and relatable unlike in audience-based advertising targeting which leaves you with a feeling of having been spammed and your space violated.
Content-based targeting leaves you with a feeling that you have participated in an authentic transaction and in appreciation you have rewarded the marketer with a conversion or more. You do not have that feeling that you have been sold:instead, you have a feeling that you have voluntarily walked into a win-win transaction.
Web users not only find relevant content informative and entertaining but also fascinating and compelling. It becomes so irresistible.that readers cannot help but come back again and again. From repeat readers,they become repeat customers in the process
The search engines are happy with such engagement between visitors and content and reward the websites with priority ranking.
Such rankings help increase the bottom line of the websites because of the spike in search results and subsequent conversions that result
Conclusion.
So how has your advertising campaign been? Do you do more content-based advertising targeting or is it audience-based? Or is it a mix of both types of targeting? Are you aware that come 2020, you will be required to get the consent of the visitor before you can target him in an audience-based advertising? Otherwise you will be out of compliance with the ePrivacy provision of the GDPR and could face stiff penalties.
Let me know your experience so far or what you plan to do going forward bearing in mind the ePrivacy provisions will take effect from June next year.
Recent Comments
2
We are all fed up with spam
It is an unwanted intrusion
And most people just ignore them, report them or take measures of protection.
On the other site of the line are doubtful crooks or poor people seeking to make quick money