Behavior Matters

I came across a great article this weekend in eMarketer.

The piece is titled Web Marketers Branch Out Beyond Banners.

That is not news as web marketers have been using other ad methods for years.

But the stats in the article are fascinating.

Here is a chart of the best performing categories of online marketing according to AdTech attendees in December 2004.

 

First of all, its my pleasure (as a large shareholder of two email marketing companies) to point out that emailing to house lists performs better than paid search (the current darling of online media).

But beyond that, my main point of this post is that behavior matters. The top three performing segments of online media are based purely on behavior.

First comes house lists.  You don’t get onto house lists in this post Can Spam environment without asking to be on them.  Opting into an email list is behavior of the highest order.  You are asking to get info mailed to you.  No wonder they perform so well.

Second comes paid search. Paid search ads result from a person typing in a keyword in a search field.  That’s behavior of the second highest order. It’s a consumer looking for information, possibly on your product or service. Again it’s not surprising that these ads perform so well.

Third comes behavioral targeting.  This technique involves the publisher storing profiles on a consumer’s behavior and serving ads that are targeted to that behavior. This is less active behavior in some regards than the first two, but it’s active behavior that’s driving these ads and I am not surprised to see that this method performs almost as well as the first two.

As some readers of this blog know, we are investors in Tacoda, the leader in behavioral targeting, so I am pleased to see that the market has come to realize that behavioral is in the big leagues along with emailing to house lists and paid search. It’s about time.