• by Mark Kecko , June 7, 2002

Ad targeting allows advertisers to reach specific audiences or demographics. This can be done with the use of IP targeting technology or by running your campaigns on subscriber sites which maintain targeting information on their user base. Targeting on subscriber sites almost guarantees that you‘ll reach your intended audience. You can profile on whatever type of data the site collects, job title, salary, age, etc. Your success does depend heavily on the accuracy of the data you’re using, but that can be checked and your campaign specifications adjusted. It‘s always a good idea to fraction off the users who have updated themselves recently or who visit the site on a regular basis. This always makes for more precise results when analyzing your campaigns success, or failure.

Another way to experiment with targeting is IP targeting. IP addresses are a unique combination of 4 groups of up to 3 numbers ranging from 0 to 255 that computers use to identify other computers on the Internet. MediaPost's IP address is 63.170.102.126. If you type http://63.170.102.126 in the address bar of your browser, MediaPost will load (I hope). Through the miracle of Domain Name Servers propagated throughout the Internet, 63.170.102.126 has a relationship with the domain name Mediapost.com, and web browsers treat the requests the same. Enough of that, though—let’s move on to the browser and server communications.

Every time an Internet browser requests a page from a web server, or an ad from an ad server, the browser sends the server the time of the request, the IP address of the request, and even the type of browser and version being used by the requesting party. All this takes place without action by the user—they‘re just visiting a web page. Ad servers use this information to target ads across large networks of sites.

Targeting by operating system can be useful for platform specific software, such as Windows Commander, an alternative to Windows Explorer that adds FTP, customized views, and other cool features. Advertisers looking to reach surfers at work could target 9-to-5 hours. Selling Calculus books? Targeting addresses that originate from .edu locations would probably do wonders for your response rate. All of this is possible from the exchange of data between the server and browser in real time.

Demographic information can also be gathered from the requesting computer‘s IP address. Using large comparison tables, ad serving companies can lookup a location by an IP address. Results can be good here, but again the accuracy of the data being used by the ad server is crucial. (By the way, this doesn’t work with the 31 million AOL users.) Targeting can yield good results, but there’s also something to be said for a highly relevant ad buy