Why behavioural targeting is not the be all and end all

With many high-profile cases of behavioural targeting going awry, too many digital advertisers are seeing behavioural targeting as the be all and end all of their campaigns. 

As the latest IPA Bellweather figures have shown, ad spend continues to increase but as digital marketing leads the way to recovery, there has been a lot of talk in the industry recently on the effectiveness of behavioural targeting.

While many of the industry champion it, many consumers are still inherently suspicious of the notion of behavioural targeting and the tracking technologies implicit within this process.

Whilst behavioural targeting can of course be very engaging when executed well, behavioural and contextual ad serving software has not actually solved the problem of ‘relevance’ on a regular enough basis. Consumer reticence arises when irrelevant or seemingly intrusive adverts are served to a user based on a mistaken judgement of a consumer’s online preferences.

Take the recent example of Marks and Spencer advertising champagne to a nine year old girl on a children’s’ games website after her mother had bought wine online. This type of mis-targeting can do more damage than good to a brand’s reputation. 

Despite what some highly vocal advertisers seem to believe, behavioural targeting is not the solution to every online advertising problem. Independent YouGov Research has shown that targeted adverts on niche websites are much more likely to receive a better response rate than adverts on generic websites, portals and search engines – regardless of whether the adverts on the major sites are adjusted for behavioural targeting.