Lessons on Ad Targeting from Facebook and Google

February 22nd, 2012 11:28 AM

Lessons on Ad Targeting from Facebook and Google

A Pew Research Center study revealed that merely three news sites out of 22 – CNN, The New York Times and Yahoo News – use very targeted advertising, as at least 45% of the displayed ads were different across users.

The study also revealed that extremely well targeted advertising is already a common thing for business models as Facebook and Google.

A significant advertising presence of Google on all major news sites has been recorded by the study.

The sponsored link box in ads with about three to seven lines of text is a very popular ad type (38% of the captured ads) on such sites. These boxes on most websites are powered by Google.

Other news sites – MSNBC, CBS and USA Today – use moderately targeted advertising, as 29% to 40% of the displayed ads differed from one user to another.

WashingtonPost.com, Newsweek.com, FoxNews.com and Time.com used slightly or even completely untargeted advertising.

In January, websites have been revisited by researchers and they noticed that two of them – theatlantic.com and latimes.com – used more targeted advertising.

In the lack of targeted advertising, news sites fail to provide truly pertinent ads to their online visitors. Targeted ads cost more and deliver higher revenue to publishers.

Examining 22 news sites, the study was able to distinguish a number of trends:

1. 46% of the displayed ads were static banner ads. 66% of all ads on the Washington Post were sponsored links and only 18% were banner ads. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal had banner ads 100%.
2. 21% of the analyzed ads were domestic ads, meaning that they were ads about various products (for instance subscriptions to newspapers or print magazines) of the same news organization.
3. 18% of the displayed ads advertised some kind of financial services; surpassing all other industry sectors.
4. Coupon advertising (for instance Groupon) or discount was quite limited.
5. 1.3% of the studied ads on these sites included stand-alone video ads.
6. Not even one top story was available in video format and as a result, pre- or post-roll video advertisements were from completely missing from the sites. Meanwhile, however, Yahoo News has teamed up with ABC News to feature additional video through the top news stories of Yahoo News’.

Pew Research examined 5,381 ads on the news sites of 22 individual news organizations in late June 2011. These news organizations included online media, broadcast, national and local newspapers. The websites were revisited in January 2012 to evaluate the level of targeted ads.

Source of information