Commentary

Reaching Low Handraisers

  • by , Featured Contributor, November 2, 2006

The following sound like non sequiturs, but there are connections, ones that marketers might want to sit up and notice.

  • People who browse Miami travel content buy Plasma TVs at a higher than normal rate.

  • People who browse school-aged parenting content purchase motorcycles at a disproportionate level.

  • People who browse certain types of movie reviews make leisure travel purchases disproportionate to their numbers.

    These are strange but true data points from purchase behaviors of online browsers in the U.S. this past year. These are not aberrations, but in fact, are from very large data sets (disclosure: my company TACODA operates a behavioral targeting ad network).

    Online advertising has been great at the intuitive stuff, such as finding and understanding the behaviors of "high handraisers"--people who are actively researching an imminent purchase. People who type "Miami travel" into Google are raising their hands high enough that you can see them. So are the folks researching Miami flights on Orbitz.com. So are the people browsing high-profile Miami travel Weblogs. How do marketers reach these handraisers? Easy, they call up the sales reps from Google and Orbitz and John Battelle's Federated Media (FM operates an ad network of many of the Internet's top blogs) and the next thing you know, they have highly targeted ads reaching in-market Miami travel buyers at critical purchase moments through each of those channels. When it comes to advertising to high handraisers, no other media platform comes close to beating the Internet.

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    But what about low handraisers? What about folks who don't research via search and raise their hands that high before they buy? What about impulse buyers? You would think that search could ID anybody with a credit card at the ready, but search amounts to less than 2% of all Web page views. Vertical sites and Weblogs are great at reaching in-market consumers, but it is hard, if not impossible, to cost-effectively accumulate both reach and frequency against a target audience at scale in the most sought-after categories, like automotive, travel and health. The only way to do that is to find a bunch of low handraisers all over the place and make them easy to target.

    That is where the behaviors at the beginning of the column come in. Online behavioral data doesn't lie, and it can help advertisers find the low handraisers. By analyzing behavioral data that seems unrelated or inconsequential, you can find pockets (sometimes BIG pockets) of prospects that will consume your products and services at rates far higher than the "usual suspects" on a typical media plan.

    As direct marketers like to say, "Nothing predicts behavior like behavior." Consumer modeling of the likelihood of purchases and browsing behavior isn't likely to yield as intuitive (and cute and folksy) segmentations as Claritias' famous Prizm Clusters, like "Heartlanders," "Urban Elders" and "Crossroads Villagers," but they are likely to be much more predictable over time. Geo-demographics are just not as accurate as they used to be. People are no longer as defined by where they lived as their parents and grandparents were. Now, they are defined much more by what they do, and their daily choices in online media and ecommerce browsing are very powerful indicators of their interest and purchase intents.

    And they don't have to raise their hands very high to be seen anymore.

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