Marketers have long depended on demographic and psychographic profiles when planning advertising campaigns. After profiling their target audience by factors such as age, income, gender or attitudinal profiles, advertisers use various planning tools to find the media channels that will most effectively reach them. While this type of targeting is an essential part of any marketing strategy, it has its limitations. A new planning method called Behavior-Based Media Planning (BBMP) takes a completely different approach, basing site recommendations instead on where actual customers are on the internet.
The Site Finder test involved six leading online advertisers. Sites recommended by Site Finder were compared against sites that were chosen by media planners using traditional planning techniques. In each case, the sites recommended by Site Finder were not sites that typically would have been chosen through demographic or psychographic planning. Each advertiser had identified a primary conversion on their web site (e.g., page views, registrations and sales) and Cost per Primary Action (CPA) goals to evaluate the results of the campaign.
The test campaigns ran for approximately four weeks. Post-campaign ROI analysis revealed that across advertisers, Cost per Primary Action (CPA) of Site Finder recommended sites was 37 percent lower than the other test sites. Furthermore, three-quarters of the sites found with Site Finder out-performed the average performance of all test sites. These successes led the advertisers involved in the test to renew advertising on 89 percent of the Site Finder-recommended sites.
BBMP tools have proven themselves to generate real results. In a world where media planners are looking for every edge to produce innovative media plans that work, Behavior-Based Media Planning tools represent a new generation of marketing intelligence that will become a standard part of the planner’s strategic arsenal.
Microsoft Advertising Institute publishes Digital Marketing Insights (DMIs), a series of publications by digital marketing experts that help our customers improve their digital marketing effectiveness. Many of these findings are also made available to the digital marketing industry at large. Each DMI is designed to help marketers more successfully build value with their customers, throughout the customer lifecycle: from awareness to acquisition and from retention to growth. Microsoft Advertising Institute also provides education in digital marketing to Microsoft customers. Learn more about Microsoft Advertising Institute.
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