The Causes and Consequences of Inaccuracies in Ad Targeting and Measurement: Evidence from Empirical Field Tests

Category: Marketing Seminar
When: 28 August 2017
, 12:15
 - 13:30
Where: Campus Westend, RuW 1.201
Speaker: Nico Neumann (University of South Australia)

The Causes and Consequences of Inaccuracies in Ad Targeting and Measurement: Evidence from Empirical Field Tests

Nico Neumann, Catherine Tucker and Timothy Whitfield

Third-party data aggregators often use online browsing and other indicators of customer behavior to build segments that can be bought for ad targeting in marketing software and electronic exchanges. Brands have spent an increasing amount of their media budgets for this kind of audience targeting, creating a multi-billion dollar business (AdExchanger 2016).

However, despite the success of these recently-available segments in the advertising industry, little is known about the reliability of the sold attributes for targeting purposes. To address this critical question, we tested the precision of demographic attributes (age and gender) in two field tests.

Overall, we find disappointing performance results, with little or no improvement of ad targeting over ‘shooting blindly’ in order to reach the desired customer group. In addition to documenting the targeting capabilities in a real-market setting, we present empirical evidence for the causes of targeting shortcomings: a) invalid web traffic, b) data extrapolation and c) tracking technology standards.

We conclude with a discussion of the practical and theoretical implications of our findings for marketing managers and economic welfare.

 

More details on dr. Nico Neumann can be found at: http://www.unisa.edu.au/Research/Institute-for-Choice-old/Our-people/Professional/.    

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