Why Losing Targeting Is A Good Thing For Advertisers
By Lauren Beerling / Associate Director, Performance Media – Paid Search
Major players in advertising continue to make announcements about the loss of data. There’s the death of the keyword, removal of tried-and-true match types, increased privacy restrictions, loss of audience targeting, the removal of cookies — the list goes on. This is bad, right?
It’s complicated. Personas have long been the holy grail of targeting. Take Jeff. Jeff is a 30– to-45-year-old father who loves the outdoors. We want to target him, but how? The answer has always been to build keyword lists and audience targeting matching the Jeff persona. But immediately, this limits our audience.
But, don’t we want to limit our audience? Here’s the reality: There are a finite number of Jeffs, and he might be expensive to capture. Your audience of 100,000 Jeffs is limited to 20,000 because, for most of them, you need to pay more than $100 to convert.
Brands should stop focusing on personas and instead turn to profitability. Is it really important for Jeff to convert if Megan, a single 56-year-old who loves the spa, is ready to?
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