'The Future of Personalised Advertising Lies in Giving Marketers Control & Transparency', by Sam Barnett, CEO & Founder, Struq

To date, behavioural retargeting companies have required marketers to play by their rules and operate within their restrictive templates (and I mean more than just their ad creatives). This just won’t cut it anymore. A ‘one size fits all’ approach, which doesn’t reflect marketers’ unique objectives or consider the end customer experience, is not what a marketer wants or needs, and it doesn’t always lead to maximised performance.

Personalised ad providers should be giving the same transparency and control as DSPs. In addition, we should always be creating high quality ads, which reflect the quality of our clients’ brands. The combination of these things will lead to a better customer experience that will improve ad engagement and increase long-term performance.

Insights and transparency to inform marketing activity

Retargeting doesn’t operate in splendid isolation. Marketers are working across multiple channels, so offering them transparency and performance insights lets them align their activity across their entire marketing mix.

Transparency about the publisher sites on which personalised ads are running, and those that are most or least effective, can have a direct impact on the planning of other marketing channels, such as brand or other direct response display. Detailed information on the products a user clicks on within an ad, and the products that they actually go on to buy onsite (not usually the same thing) is also extremely useful.

Advertisers can use this information across other marketing channels, such as search, as well as to optimise their own sites. Some of our clients pass on their Struq data to their affiliate base so that affiliates can optimise against it, or they pass it on to their design teams to use when creating display ads.

Giving marketers transparent access to their campaign data allows them to measure the impact of their personalised targeting across all their activity. I spoke to a client who saw a 50% uplift in their search volumes by adding a retargeting campaign. Of course this isn’t standard, but it is certainly useful information for marketers to know.

Control to manage overall marketing objectives and customer experience

Being informed is one thing. The next step is to give marketers control over their campaigns so that they can manage their overall marketing objectives and their end customer experience.

The most obvious example of this is frequency control. In an industry that talks about ad relevance, an important point to remember is that an ad ceases to be relevant when an individual has seen it twenty times in an hour. This is what people hate about retargeting. Frequency capping controls are vital so that marketers can manage their customers’ experience.

As I mentioned, personalised advertising is only part of a marketing mix. Marketers are not only working across multiple channels, they are dealing with seasonality, weather, flash sales, promotional drives, sales vs. volume targets, tight margin, etc. Being able to quickly tailor their ad creative with relevant messages, or to weight ad delivery differently at different times, is fundamentally useful for marketers.

Another example of important controls is obvious, but is shockingly not always available to marketers: that is budget controls. If we really want to create a display ecosystem that mimics the success of search, then we need to stop spending budgets in the first two weeks of the month and stop giving a false impression of control by charging inflated CPCs for irrelevant functions that don’t drive incremental performance. Give marketers control over things that make a difference.

Summary

The display sector is continually evolving to provide transparency and control for marketers. This has generated renewed interest amongst advertisers and a resurgence in spend. Personalised advertising should be no different, and we should continuously innovate to produce online advertising that delivers a great customer experience and exceptional performance, working to marketers’ objectives and not ours.