Audience targeting: Alive and well and expanding

AudienceScience and Digiday teamed up to survey 100 advertisers, 256 agencies and 152 publishers. AudienceScience, which facilitates audience targeting, conducted the survey to see how budgets for audience targeting were being allocated, among other trends. 

 

It seems privacy concerns haven't killed audience targeting, as more than 72 percent of advertisers and 70 percent of agencies plan to increase audience targeting budgets in 2011. In addition, 58 percent of advertisers and agencies that don't currently target plan to add budget for audience targeting this year. About a third of both advertisers and agencies plan to increase audience targeting spend by $100,000 to $500,000.

 

For publishers, this suggests audience targeting will be in greater demand from advertising customers. The largest reason cited by advertisers and agencies for the increase: as audience targeting has become more effective, they can justify spending more on it. 

 

Surveyed publishers using audience targeting claimed  an average increase in display ad revenue of 86.4 percent, which AudienceScience noted was up 45 percent since last year. (It should be noted that we don't know how much this can be attributed to audience targeting.) Publishers site a variety of benefits to using audience targeting, from higher CPMs to better customer acquisition, as seen in this slide:

 

 

 

Behavioral targeting (e.g. targeting someone based on their Web behavior) is the most popular form of targeting from advertisers (83 percent use it). But, interestingly, a slightly smaller number of publishers (73 percent) support behavioral targeting. Retargeting, geographic targeting and demographic targeting are supported by more publishers. For agencies, demographic and behavioral targeting are the most popular.

 

 

The survey also suggests audience targeting will move beyond display advertising to other digital platforms such as in-stream video ads and mobile, as seen on the below slide. Will privacy controls and new technology make audience targeting more possible on these platforms? Only time will tell.