Targeted Advertising
Targeted advertising is something a vast majority of us experience. We see ads everyday, and it turns out a lot of them are, in someway, targeted. This isn’t news, and the general public agrees that phones can pick up key words from a conversation, and present an ad related to the topic of your personal discussion. While there is debate regarding the privacy concerns that targeted advertising brings, a more subtle question is how effective are these targeted ads? Ayman Farahat and Michael Bailey wanted to answer this question and came up with some interesting results. Farahat and Bailey first state that clickthrough rates for ads have decreased from 3% to less than 1%. To try and increase clickthrough rates online advertisers have resorted to targeted advertising.
Farahat and Baileys separated searches into two groups, one being a category search, and the other being a brand search. Their main results found that the clickthrough rate was 0.86% for targeted advertising that did a category search, while clickthrough rates for untargeted were 0.03%. While targeted advertising does increase the clickthrough rate compared to a regular ad, it doesn’t actually bring clickthrough rates back to 3% where it originally once was. These results are actually not surprising. When I think of my own experience with targeted ads, I have never actually bought the product that is being advertised, rather I just think about a time I had a conversation related to this ad. I have talked to other peers about their experience with targeted ads, and they have similar feelings. Perhaps the problem with targeted advertising is that it is too targeted. Targeted ads make people more worried about the capability of technology rather than interested in the companies product. As users of the web, we have the power to click and choose any ad we want to, however when there is so much to click on, a vast majority of ads are being left alone.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2187836.2187852?casa_token=aWo9mKDBBZQAAAAA:QdTKtME_lEbOFR0bs_G0JuhuMWO5lgLkfshDmxIK_7kCKOvG4Ep6S1ZVhEvoKW9Ydz9Snq2RrGKbAw