Pitfalls of behaviour based advertising
0I’m personally not a big fan of PPC advertising online, unless you can really hone in on your audience. Facebook and LinkedIn provide you this, but the statistics leave much to be desired. With time, though, one of the big things with advertising businesses like Google Adwords, AdBrite and others is behaviour based advertising.
Whilst is may sound like behaviour based advertising is a great idea – well, it’s really a blackhole that will suck your advertising budget why. But first, for those who don’t know, let me explain what this is.
Behaviour (or behavior in the US) Based Advertising
So you’re browsing the internet and you come across something you like, or click on a certain link or ad and land on a website which may be of interest to you. A cookie gets generated and stored on your machine. Now, until you clear your browser history and delete this business or company knows you visited their site, and each time you land on a site that uses a network that these guys advertise with, you’ll see their ad – over and over again. Confused. Here’s a scenario:
You visit website X to see a product. You don’t buy it and you leave the site. Then you come land on Asifism.com, which has Google Adwords ads on it. If website X advertises with Google Adwords, you’ll see a website X ad on Asifism.com any other website that uses Google Adwords until you clear your cookies.
So, what’s the problem? Well, this may be great because marketing experts (also known as morons, sometimes) claim that it takes 3-5 times for someone to see your ad or message before they will act on it. It’s a bit like suggesting an idea to a visitor again an again until it becomes acceptable. So, if you sell a web app that may have been of interest to someone, and you float your ad to them long enough, they may just come and sign up. And this is where the problem begins.
The Problem
I’ve recently been trying out a bunch of CRM applications. I personally think MS Dynamics CRM is great, but it’s quite comprehensive and a tad bit costly, especially if you start piling up some users. So, I researched a whole bunch of these CRMs at work and decided I’ll sign up for a couple of them. But I didn’t sign up on the same machine I browsed the websites with. I signed up using another PC. Now I spend 8 hours a day doing various things on the internet and keep seeing ads for a CRM application for which I’m running on a free trial. I conveniently click on the add and end up on their website. If, after 15 days, I decide I don’t want to use their service, they’ve probably paid at least $2-3 each time I clicked on the add and got zero business out of it.
So why do businesses do it?
Probably because they don’t realise that this really is not that brilliant a marketing tactic.
I’ve received repeated mail and invites from marketing experts who’re going train you on how to use this to your benefit – don’t buy their baloney. Ultimately, as the advertiser, you can’t do much to stop me from seeing your ad once the ad network picks up that cookie and starts displaying your ad. In fact, if I am a competitor and know that you are using behaviour based advertising, well, I can run out your PPC daily allowance rather quickly.
Advertising on Facebook, for instance, is just as risky. The same person can see your ad 10 times and come visit your site 10 times and not sign up. Or, they could keep clicking on the ad and coming to your site to log-in to their account. Until these kind of, well, holes in the system can be addressed, I recommend staying away from behaviour based advertising.
Besides, PPC is not for everyone. More businesses now probably shutdown because of how much money they spend on Google Adwords than make a killing. It’s not 2001 anymore!
