Target That Online Campaign

I was reading today about a recently released Nielsen white paper titled "Reaching the Right Audiences Online: Early Findings From Nielsen Online Ratings."  Nice short, catchy title, huh?


Like most studies from Nielsen this one stated many different findings.  Two of them caught my eye since I thought about their assertions often over the past several years.  They are:

- Online campaigns are being consistently delivered to people outside the advertiser's intended audience.

And consequently...

- Campaigns with high impressions are still only reaching a fraction of the intended audience.

There is a trick that is well-known by webmaster's that often makes these two assertions indesputable. 

I know many webmasters who run sites for established media companies.  These sites typically report local news and weather.  They will also grab the occasional news-wire story to add more pages to the sites.  These wire stories are often what would fall into the category of "Weird News," off-beat, often titillating stories usually no longer than a paragraph, usually worthy of an eye-popping headline and very little else.
 
These webmasters are under a great deal of pressure by their companies to continually increase page-views and subsequently ad impressions.  That is where the money comes from. 

So the trick is to take one of those off-beat stories, write an attention-grabbing headline and submit it to one of the big news aggregating sites like Drudge or Fark.  Those sites are HUGELY  and INTERNATIONALLY popular.  If the story is accepted, the result is an explosion in page-views and ad impressions for a day and a half or so.  This often creates enough traffic to take care of a local advertiser's 150,000 or 300,000 impression campaign.  I assure you this happens on a fairly regular basis because the webmasters are expected to push their traffic.

But that traffic is often coming from all over the United States, North America, even Europe and Asia, in other words..."people who are outside the advertiser's intended audience."  Are the local advertisers really being taken care of when they run campaigns "reaching a fraction of the intended audience?"  Of course not. 

Make sure you talk to your account executive about geo-targeting, behavioral-targeting, and any other kind of targeting they can provide.  Otherwise, you may receive a great deal of useless and expensive web exposure.

Click here if you would like to download Nielsen's white paper:    http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/for-online-advertising-big-impression-counts-dont-mean-high-audience-reach/