Intent Targeting Vs behaviour Targeting

Why Intent Targeting is better then Behaviour Targeting?

Past two years there has been lot of noise on BT. and of late Google had also entered into the foray. But did we hear any success?
There have been all noises but no results. Can any BT company justify the spikes in sales due to BT? There are companies like Blue Lithium, Double Click, Real Media, Tacoda, Yahoo and Akamai, who have been busy presenting themselves as a BT enabled company. And I really doubt if Marketing heads gets anything out of this. Correct me if I am wrong. I have talked to most of these companies, the only documents i get are the colourful ppt’s, saying “How to identify and target a Auto user and so on”. Do they have enough metrics which can clearly indicate increase in revenue?
For a start, let us understand the working of BT.

1. Foremost is to identify the behaviour,
2. How do they identify a user behaviour? There are 100 + listed user behaviour in Tacoda site.
   First you need to identify parameters, 50 0dd parameters; the value of those parameters will then define the 100 + user behaviour. Possible! Very much possible! Then you also hear all those machine learning algorithms they are using. Then they try to group them, see creating a targeting algorithm for all of them and then serving the targeted user is not that easy. Then they spent lot of computing resources to organise the data offline.
3. Next is targeting the user.
   Now all this to identify an “Apparel shopper” so that they can target the “Lingerie” poster to the user. Lingerie, yes they went back and also checked the sex, age and income group of the user. They might have spent money for surveys, to collect the demographic data.
4. Then there are privacy concerns, the active cookies, and the duplicate cookies and so on. How long do they keep cookies as active? How many sessions of a user does it take to bring out the behaviour? How many behaviour does a single user have?

Now what I really like to know is, What is the % of all impression they have served using BT? What is the CTR of the campaign, where BT is used and not re-targeting? A/B testing reports, same campaign ran with BT and without BT?
So, BT stuff is good, till the time you want to create a great PR. But for branding advertisers, still a question mark.
For branding purpose, I think Quality of Inventory works better then BT. Why should anyone pay more for a BT user, when they can get access to quality inventory with less cost.
For performance advertisers, where they need sales? Yes.

Let’s get back to Intent Targeting, also known as in session targeting. But the scope is wider then in session. The time frame for IT (Intent Targeting) stays till the intent of the user is there. It can be from few hours to few days.
Let us understand Intent Targeting.

Foremost is to identify the intent of the user. How do we define Intent? Key words will help us. Keywords like “need”,”want”,”looking at”,”purchase”,”service”,”using”, “fly” will help us identify the intent of the user. We need to classify them into either servicing or purchase intent. Next is to identify the product or services. Keywords or Nouns like “CRM software”, “Baseball”, “TV”, “Shirt” will give away. We have identified the intent, product and the user. Next is to identify the group of advertisements for the product. And the job is done.
This is easy, but why IT is not that popular.

1. Because everyone is waiting for semantic web. They are waiting for some one else to start with.
2. This is only possible with query search. Is it so! Who all said advertisements on social media are not picking up. I say, “Collect social media sites like Digg, Facebook, MySpace” and dozen more to find the intended user. Create an Intent network and go party!

Let us find out how IT is better then BT?

1. IT is light wieght, BT is heavy wieght champion.
2. Internet is more about measurement (in terms of advertisement, can some one tell me the number of exclusive only users in internet?) and IT get measured well and delivers better then BT. (less metrices involved in IT)
3. No Privacy concerns to burn the back.
4. Earning on IT can be based on sale (CPL can vary with the average sale value of the product), unlike BT where media is sold (fixed price). So we can make lot more then other networks.
5. IT doesn’t need to collect the user profile for months and years. Lifecycle of a user profile is 8 to 10 days, depending on the product.

Is there any company who really works on intent targeting? If yes I would like to hear from them. If No, then let’s start something very simple.

Related posts:

1. 5 Steps to Create Business value through online marketing. I am not talking about SEO/SEM . But the discussion...
2. Retargeting Lot and lot of hype is there on Re-targeting...
3. IPTV and Indian Audience A steal, Bharti Airtel has come with an IPTV....
4. New Media Advertising! Sales and Marketing started with the Door to Door Sales....
5. Video E-mail and their use. It started with lot of hype and media PR. But...