The Insightful Media Series – Audience Extension

The Insightful Media Series – Audience Extension

With the ever evolving nature of online marketing and the rapid pace of change, it has become a real challenge for marketers to remain fully informed, up to date with market developments and ultimately confident in their knowledge and mastery of all things digital.

With this in mind we have decided to create the Insightful Media Series. Each week we will review a topic. This topic will be an important element of the digital marketing toolkit. As a performance outcome company, our passion lies in exploring topics which impact return on investment.

In this edition of the Insightful Media Series, we are going to delve into the topic of Audience Extension, discussing how it works, why you should use it and what the future holds. But first, we have to ask…

 


What is Audience Extension?

Audience Extension is an application of behavioural targeting that allows Digital Publishers to generate revenue from their web traffic by allowing advertisers to reach their audience far beyond their website. Through Audience Extension, publishers can keep track of their website visitors, and then advertisers can serve ads to that audience on different sites across the web. Audience Extension is usually offered as a package by the Publisher where advertisers can pay a rate to have access to and bid on the Publisher’s intent rich web audience. This behavioural advertising tactic, driven by cookie-laden browsers and retargeting, is typically used by Publishers to supplement revenue with their valuable audience data by granting advertisers access to use this data to target a high intent audience across the web.

 


How Does Audience Extension work?

As is the case with any form of behavioural advertising, Audience Extension relies on cookie technology. The first step in Audience Extension is to identify the attributes driving conversions or engagement for a target audience. Using cookies, a profile can be established by drawing on information such as websites and pages visited, products purchased and keyword searched.

Adding the cookie to a publisher’s site is relatively straight-forward, Cookies are small text files that anonymously store data and all the  publishers have to do to begin is place a few lines of code in the HTML of their website, which tags people who visit their site with a special retargeting cookie. From there onwards, when a user visits the publisher’s site, a pixel – usually powered by a data management company or a buying platform such as TURN or Rocketfuel – will be attached to their browser and uses the resulting audience segments to retarget and buy ads across the various websites they will then visit.

 

 


Why Should You Use Audience Extension?

Premium Audience at Lower Cost:

Typically, the cost of an Audience Extension ad buy is lower than running the ads on the premium site alone. This is because by profiling user activity across the website, that valuable audience can then be reached on less sought after channels that tend to interest them. For example, a high intent user who visited a broadband comparison site could then hypothetically be targeted by a broadband company on a sports website, the right audience in an unrelated environment.

Rise of Programmatic:

There has never been a better time to take advantage of Audience Extension. With the rise of Programmatic and monetisation systems, it has become far easier to deploy Audience Extension campaigns. In some cases, Audience Extension comes naturally as part of a Programmatic package. You should use Audience Extension if you like the audience on a particular site or channel and want to reach that same audience (type) in greater numbers and/or more often.

Intent Rich Users:

Audience Extension is particularly popular on “intent” rich sites where users, by their behaviour, qualify their interests and purchase intent. Consider a car classifieds site or an energy price comparison engine. Advertisers here have access to a rich pool of prospective future customers – people are on these sites to research and shop! The people on these sites are qualified, in-market, and quite often hurtling towards the checkout. The trick here is to optimise your communications with these prospects and find more like them.

Keep the Conversation Going:

Why is it important to optimise communications? Very rarely will somebody click or visit a site as a result of seeing an ad and buy immediately. The purchase consideration cycle is usually longer for a variety of reasons including purchase value, product complexity and often time pressure/urgency- think car insurance! In this instance audience extension can provide advertisers with an ideal means of building frequency over time after the initial search and/or product comparison. Publishers have been found to include audience extension in campaign proposals to extend reach and add impressions, with the percentage of respondents citing this rising from 47% to 73% year over year, according to recent research by Rocketfuel.

This has the effect or reinforcing the advertiser’s message ensuring continuity and hopefully dovetailing perfectly with the product consideration cycle.

Online-Privacy-PolicyOnline Privacy and Audience Extension:

One of the major challenges facing Audience Extension is the question of privacy. The increased sophistication in which publishers and advertisers can use audience data has expectedly caused privacy concerns among web users who worry that their personal data and online behaviour is being exploited for advertising. It is up to publishers and advertisers to provide greater transparency on how they use the data and to fully explain that while this technique can be sometimes scarily accurate at delivering customised ads, nobody’s personally identifiable information is being used, gathered or exchanged by publishers and advertisers. Strict regulations are in place to ensure online privacy, as can be seen in our own Privacy Policy.

The Future of Audience Extension:

According to a recent survey by Digiday, more than half of publishers (52%) are offering Audience Extension to their advertising partners. Of those who do offer, at least one third (33%) offer Audience Extension on either most or all of the campaign proposals. Publishers have become more sophisticated with a greater understanding of the benefits of Audience Extension. 77% now say they are ‘very familiar’ with Audience Extension which has inevitably led to a greater understanding of the benefits of this behavioural advertising tactic. This means that publishers have made calls for better reporting tools and greater transparency in the future, as they continue to enjoy the success of a tactic that 67% of publishers have said allows them to meet client goals that would have been impossible to reach a year ago.

How can Insightful Media Help?

We can put you in-touch with a number of our highly defined audiences when they are elsewhere on the Web. In the case of our intent sites, we can help you continue your conversation with in-market shoppers in categories such as energy, broadband and money services.

To discuss Audience Extension options with Insightful Media, contact Lee on (01) 703 0406 or email lee@insightfulmedia.ie

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Further Reading:

Admonsters Audience Extension Playbook
http://www.admonsters.com/AudExtensionPlaybook

Reaching Out with Audience Extension by Kerel Cooper, Director of Ad Ops, Advance Digital
http://www.admonsters.com/session/making-use-audience-extension/148410

Audience Extension Gives Top Publishers a Much Needed Lifeline
http://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2013/03/27/audience-extension-gives-top-publishers-a-much-needed-lifeline-by-ian-monaghan-head-of-advertising-operations-tubemogul/

The Allure of Audience Extension: Interview With Craig Leshen, OAO https://www.admonsters.com/blog/allure-audience-extension-interview-craig-leshen-oao

A Definitive Guide to Audience Extension

https://retargeter.com/blog/general/a-definitive-guide-to-audience-extension

Sharing Knowledge : Audience Extension

http://www.knowonlineadvertising.com/sharing-knowledge/audience-extension/

Publishers Reach For Audience Extension

http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Publishers-Reach-Audience-Extension/1011433

Digidays ‘The Value of Digital Publisher Audiences Survey 2014

http://www.slideshare.net/JinenneSutherland/audience-extension-survey-2014-46888295

(*Privacy Policy image courtesy of Stuart Miles and FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

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