A Positive Shift in Audience Targeting Perceptions and Spending

A recent study AudienceScience commissioned with Forrester Consulting revealed what we’ve seen firsthand over the last few years— marketers are seeing the power of audience targeting and display for two of their critical campaign objectives: a direct response channel AND as a branding channel.

77% of marketers surveyed for this study currently use or plan to use audience targeting.  In fact, 42% of marketers surveyed planning to begin or increase usage of audience targeting cited the ability to reach targeted consumers as a key driving factor in their decision making, and 32% cited the fact that they simply get better results than with other forms of targeting; other factors noted were scalability, cost savings, data quality and accuracy.

According to Forrester Consulting’s Online Advertising and Classifieds Model, “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014,” spending on display advertising overall is expected to double from $8.4 billion in 2010 to close to $17 billion in 2014. Top marketers already recognize the value of this growth as a contributing factor to future sales projections and are positioning themselves to be market leaders in their product categories.

JP Morgan recently stated that consumers spend about 38% of their time online, but marketers are only spending 8% of their budgets here. While this disparity in ad spend signifies the incredible opportunity to come, right now it’s important to make each dollar count. Most marketers in this survey, and I’d venture to guess across the board, are looking for financial ROI from their online ad campaigns, and audience targeting has proven over and over that it is the most efficient and effective way to reach qualified audiences online to drive revenue.