Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?
- Reference: 1593768429
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/03/stop_tracking_increase_revenue_effectiveness/
- Source link:
From a marketing perspective, targeted advertising is supposedly a dream realised: why waste money showing ads to people who are not likely to become customers? The success of Facebook is based on the ability of advertisers to define an audience by location, age, sex, personal interests and more.
Per [1]Google : "Targeting gives you the ability to show your ads to reach people with specific interests – namely, people who are interested in your products and services – and show them relevant ads."
Another idea is tracking the customer journey, from first seeing an ad to the final purchase. Great for marketing, but there are concerns about ad targeting based both on privacy and controversial matters like disinformation and manipulative political campaigns.
[2]
Dutch national broadcaster NPO saw ad revenue rise after stopping use of third-party trackers on its site
Ryan's report questions the core assumption that targeted adverting is more effective. "In January 2020, when NPO switched from tracking-based targeting to contextual targeting, revenue increased 61 per cent more than January 2019. In February, revenue increased 76 per cent over the previous year," [3]he wrote .
Contextual targeting is the old-school approach of showing ads related to the content around them, such as displaying holiday advertising alongside travel features. Search engine DuckDuckGo [4]relies on this , saying: "When you search on DuckDuckGo, we can show you an ad based on the keywords you type in. That's it."
The research is based on a report by STER (Stichting Ether Reclame), the company that manages advertising for NPO, which was presented at the Computer Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) 2020 conference held in Brussels in January. The big question: how is it that contextual advertising can bring in more revenue for the publisher?
The answer may be more to do with the nature of the adtech industry than the effectiveness of the ads themselves. STER says that non-personalised ads are "just as effective", measured by number of clicks an ad attracts, though the click-through is not a complete analysis of effectiveness.
[5]
NPO's site gets a clean bill of health from Firefox tracking protection
This is only one of several factors. The NPO was concerned about data protection regulations and whether its use of ad trackers was compliant. When NPO implemented "a new approach to consent that allowed people to reject 3rd party tracking, 90 per cent of their visitors did so,” said Ryan. Further, the popularity of blockers such as those [6]recently adopted by Firefox is another issue, reducing the ability of advertisers to track users.
Perhaps the biggest factor is lack of transparency in the real-time bidding (RTB) market for online advertising. When targeted ads appear on sites like NPO, they cannot be bought directly from NPO (or STER) because the publisher lacks the data that drives the targeting. Instead they are bought via an agency, which takes a cut of the revenue.
How much is this cut? Ryan refers to a [7]2016 report in which The Guardian said that "a lot of the money that [advertisers] think they are giving to premium publishers is not actually getting to us."
In the worst case, only 30 per cent of the money paid by the advertiser reaches the publisher, according to the report. This means contextual advertising is potentially much more profitable for publishers, even if the ads themselves are somewhat less effective. [8]According to Ryan , RTB "is a cancer eating the heart of legitimate media, and a business model for the bottom of the web."
The suggestion, therefore, is not so much that targeted advertising never works, but rather that a greedy adtech industry, along with the impact of privacy concerns, is giving publishers an incentive to return to plain old contextual advertising. ®
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[1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6123875?hl=en
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/07/02/economic_brave2.jpg
[3] https://brave.com/npo/
[4] https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-revenue-model/
[5] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/07/02/tracking.png
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/01/firefox_78_protections_dashboard_new/
[7] https://mediatel.co.uk/news/2016/10/04/where-did-the-money-go-guardian-buys-its-own-ad-inventory/
[8] https://brave.com/dr-johnny-ryans-testimony-at-the-international-grand-chamber-on-disinformation-and-fake-news/
[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
... effective. According to Ryan, RTB online advertising "is a cancer eating the heart of legitimate media, and a business model for the bottom of the web." ...
There, FTFY
Targeted ads miss all of the people whose tracking doesn't show interest in a product but that is not to say they have no interest or are unlikely to buy it.
I rarely click on an ad but sometimes having seen a name will remind me of something I wish to buy.
It seems the best marketing people are those employed to market services to marketing people.
Shocking news!
People interested in a subject, more frequently interested in using products, services related to subject?!
In other news, Pope a Catholic, bears deficate in woods and Sherlock loses track of Schitt.
On a more serious note, the issue is also that the RTB ads are easier to setup for sites, since they don't require adding context for articles. But as with many things this is probably much more nuanced a subject.
I still fail to see the value to advertisers in telling me about stuff I have already bought and have no need for more, stuff I have looked at and decided not to buy and suppliers I already know about. The only effect it has on me is to piss me off. I can think of several prominent advertisers I would think twice about using and have indeed avoided. To my ultimate benefit, may I add.
There is one enormous benefit of targeted ads
They are an effective way to convince people that their advertising budget should be spent on targeted ads.
Re: There is one enormous benefit of targeted ads
Exactly this. My interpretation of behavioural/targeted ads has always been that they're less good, but provide a "unique selling point" for the ad-platform to shout about to advertisers: we can get you more relevant clicks... Like most marketing, the claim needn't actually be true.
Targeted ads, to me, always seem to consist of something you bought months ago, or something you decided against buying.
'Relevant' ads
Meanwhile, ads that are targeted at you based on your web history and failing dismally at their job - flinging washing machine ads after you've bought a washing machine - have become such a cliche that comedians are using them. Perhaps the targeting just doesn't work very well.
makes sense
Targeting probably works best for campaigns, when you can benefit from repeatedly hitting the target with similar messages. Much less useful to advertise an endless succession of crimping tools to someone who has just bought a crimping tool.
Targetted by idiots
The problem with 'targeted' advertising seems to be it's total inability to comprehend time scales and human behaviour. So I search for Washing Machines - clever targeted algorithms assume that, for the next 12 months I must be interested in washing machines, presumably assuming that all their adverts are so rubbish that I can't possibly have bought a new washing machine within, say 48 hours of starting to look. I stay in a hotel in Boston - targeted adverts assume that for ever more it must be somewhere I want to go back to, carefully ignoring the fact that I went there for a weekend a year ago , and also ignoring the fact that in the same year I went to a couple of nice hot sunny places that I might like to go back to more - but for some reason (bidding by the Boston tourist authorities?) never pop up in side bars. (And ty El Reg - because I looked for hatches (for the deck of a boat) a couple of weeks ago, I find your telecoms/IT cavity wall hatches sales pitch brighten up my morning every day, but I already bought the hatches I need and I'm not sure the ones you advertise are waterproof..)
Targeted ads are sometimes quite stupid, e.g. on YouTube. Sometimes, when an ad is off by solar systems from my own interests and the target audience of the video I am watching, I am left wondering if the targeted-ad business isn't a hype/scam waiting to blow over.
I would very much prefer old-school approach to advertisement.
I hate being followed by adverts across the net
A few years back I’d been checking out some popular nsfw sites on my personal computer.
A few weeks later at work on my work machine, googling an issue with my boss among the pages returned where adverts for Russian brides, dating sites and others, clicking any of the links to stack exchange or equivalents resulted in further Inappropriate adverts Being displayed. I was naturally embarrassed and pissed off I’d been followed across machines.
The only commonality I could see was that I was signed into gmail on both machines.
I now use ad blockers, change tracking id’s frequently and click the triangle asking not to be shown those types of adverts again.
I’d much rather see non targeted ads at all times.
Dear Advertisers,
There is something you should know.
I will *never* click on any ad displayed on any of my electronic devices. Regardless of their relevance to me, my life, or my current shopping requirements. Never.
Once in a blue moon, an advert might remind me of something, in which case I will go and search for whatever it is I was reminded of on my own time. But I will NEVER click on a garbage square of annoying bullshit vying for my attention.
So just fuck off already. :)
What, you mean people who are searching for holidays might want to see adverts about holidays? You mean, rather than see adverts about power showers, because they bought one last month?
Well, duh.