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How To Find New Customers Through Audience Ad Targeting

Online consumer behavior continues to get more complicated as consumers spend more time online. Technology promised to make it easier, but some would argue to the contrary.

Experian Hitwise, the online measurement service from Experian Marketing Services, hopes to close that gap with the launch of audience targeting tool AudienceView.

Simon Bradstock, Experian SVP and GM, claims the benefits from AudienceView reside in the company's ability to combine an online sample of 10 million users in the United States with data in the offline Experian Marketing Service ConsumerView database, which provides insights from 235 million U.S. consumers and 113 million households classified by more than 1,000 behavioral attributes.

Some of the filtered data integrated into AudienceView comes from Internet Service Providers, the gatekeepers to the Internet now aimed at keeping online ad targeting companies honest.  Bradstock said the company never sees any personal data because the ISPs filter it before passing off to Experian audience data associated with specific behavioral attributes.

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Market segments let marketers target women ages 20 to 25 who visited Kohl's Web site and bought blue jeans within the past month. This might be Levi's best customer. But Kohls doesn't sell Levis. Sears does. Levis might want to convert Kohls' customer to purchase jeans from Sears, so it creates an audience segment targeting this group of consumers.

Tools in AudienceView can determine conversion rates of an audience segment on a specific Web site and create a profile to determine their characteristics, from age to salary to shopping habits, and determine the search terms they rely on to find products and services. Then marketers need to analyze "lookalike" Web sites to find that audience elsewhere. The idea is to find customers and bring them in from other sites.

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