Ad Targeting is Something you HAVE to test – A Real Example
Sitting at 32,000 feet, I started thinking about all the different airline promotions I’ve seen and responded to online. Before gas passed the $4 mark and airlines started shutting down, Aloha Air’s banners would pop up all over the place. What impressed me about their campaign enough for me to write about it here wasn’t the range of sites the banners were on, nor the creative. What impressed me was the level of targeting and change outs the campaign would go through.
Sitting at 32,000 feet, I started thinking about all the different airline promotions I’ve seen and responded to online. Before gas passed the $4 mark and airlines started shutting down, Aloha Air’s banners would pop up all over the place. What impressed me about their campaign enough for me to write about it here wasn’t the range of sites the banners were on, nor the creative. What impressed me was the level of targeting and change outs the campaign would go through. I visit several flier related websites on my laptop and virtually none on my desktop – guess which computer saw the Aloha Banners more often? While there are certainly reasons to forgo close-in targeting and get access to the very lowest CPMs, or simply stick to simple demo/ geo targeting which the aloha campaign also did a great job of as I’ll explain later, making use of targeting is something you have to test. And I do mean have to.
On some level targeting is crucial to a display campaign — crucial to reaching the right audience and crucial to driving in an ROI – especially when selling a highly competitive offering in a crowded market space. If you don’t target you’re wasting your money speaking to the wrong audience and even though many sites may seem to appeal to a certain audience more than others, we all know that not everyone there fits that bill which means many of the impressions you’re buying are wasted delivering the wrong message to the wrong audience.
Messages and audiences leads me to my second point about the Aloha Campaign and about banners. Theoretically the vast majority of US households are at least casually interested in a trip to Hawaii so why target at all? Simply put, because you can and therefore you should. Seriously. Even if Aloha wanted to reach everyone in the US over age 18 they should still be reaching them differently which means they still need to target, at least to some degree. A prospect living in New York is going to get a different rate than someone in LA and that’s where Aloha’s campaign really shined. While many companies spend their time building rich media banners and making the most amazing site experiences, Aloha used nice, but not overly amazing creative which they updated all the time. Seats not selling fast enough? Prices got cut, banners got updated. New promotional offer for a vacation package? New banners. And they used this same strategy in their media buys – during the busy travel season I’d often go weeks without seeing banners only to have a campaign pop up at the very last minute and disappear a few days later when the promotion was done or the remaining seats were filled.
Of course for Aloha, targeting made a whole lot of sense on a lot of levels — Aloha doesn’t fly out of every airport just as many retail companies don’t service every state and some services aren’t available in every jurisdiction. Now I don’t pretend to know the results of the Aloha campaign or even the exact level of sophistication they used. But I do know the campaign worked wonders at reaching me – I’d often look (or wait for) an Aloha banner with a new offer and I probably clicked through more than I had with any other campaign… I even booked a few trips with them both directly from a banner promotion ($149 to Hawaii is just too cheap to pass up) or in-directly down the road.
No matter who your business focuses on, targeting is essential in a campaign when it’s available. And by targeting, I mean using visitor data whenever known. This is where the old world mediums fall short – targeting on tv is much like buying a site. Having the ability to cut your campaign spend by huge amounts while still reaching just about everyone in your target demo is simply too good to pass up. Even complete brand marketing can excel from targeting when used to focus different creative and messages. As other media channels see a decrease in spend I imagine we’ll see an increase in targeting opportunities offline as well (Google’s TV platform already seems to have this future in mind). So while Aloha may be gone much to my dismay, perhaps in a few years I’ll see last minute specials advertised specifically to me from another airline but this time combined starting with a TV ad, followed up with something in print and ending up online when I’m ready to make the click.
