Online behavioural advertising case studies

Case study – Guardian and BP

The Guardian have been offering an on-site behavioural advertising solution since mid-2005 and have created behavioural campaigns for over 150 brands and sold over ½ billion advertising impressions. Behavioural advertising now accounts for between 10% - 20% of annual display revenue.

The Guardian sales team create customised segments of relevant audiences based on their behaviour on www.guardian.co.uk:

Rule based segments: Creating segments based on what pages and sections users have visited and how frequently those visits were made.

Keyword segments: Using individual and groups of keywords to build really focused segments of users who have been reading speciic types of content.

Search term segments: Also segmenting people by what search terms they have used.

IP segments: The Guardian can segment readers based on their IP data - geography, SIC code (Standard Industrial Classiication of Economic Activities) and even specific domain names.

By changing the recency and frequency of behaviours Guardian can create even more targeted segments which perfectly match the needs of their advertisers. All users who are in a particular segment have their cookies stamped with a unique ID number which their ad server can identify. This means advertisers can be assured that behavioural advertising campaigns reach their target audience wherever they are on www.guardian.co.uk.

For BP, the Guardian built a segment of ethically minded people using a combination of using keywords like ‘carbon trust’ and ‘climate change’ with visits to certain sections of their Environment channel. BP then bought a campaign on our site using this behavioural segment, and bought contextual ads on the Environment channel and some RON ads.

They tracked the campaign with Dynamic Logic and found the BT segment was more effective at hitting those environmentally concerned consumers – therefore targeting the right sort of people. Where this campaign really worked however, was that although CTR were lower for the BT segment, the conversions were significantly higher.

Case study – iqola Energy Drink

The Idea:

Iqola was an invented energy drink – “the first drink to improve your IQ” – to build awareness for a new brand amongst a niche audience of senior media executives purely via targeted display advertising.

The Campaign:

Spread over a three week period, the iqola campaign re-targeted everyone who registered online to attend a Microsoft Advertising organised conference on behavioural advertising in late September 2009. Impressions were delivered across AOL, Facebook, MSN, Specific Media Network and Yahoo!

The Result:

50,000 impressions served.216 unique users.67% of those polled recognised iqola as a brand they had seen online.