The IAB considers the respective benefits of placing ads on sites with huge amounts of traffic versus targeting your campaigns to smaller, more relevant audiences.
The UK is now a nation of experienced online experts. 83% of UK internet users have been online for at least 3 years (BMRB Internet Monitor, Feb 2007), spending an average of 23 hours a week on the internet (YouGov, Sept 2006). Like any relationship of three years, those initial flourishes of getting to know one another and intense experimentation have given way to something more comfortable and familiar. Yes occasionally you might still find yourself losing entire days exploring uncharted areas of the web, but in the main our time online is more focused and routine-based.
Yes, humans are by nature habitual creatures and that is certainly true of our online behaviour. A survey published last year by Directgov revealed that over half of internet-using Britons regularly visit just six sites or less. The top 10 brands accounted for 37% of all visitor sessions (Nielsen//NetRatings, March 2007, UK), but the niche nature of the medium is also allowing more specialist sites to become a big part of the internet audiences’ behaviour.
The leading websites on the internet enjoy the ‘Tardis effect’. In the respect they might appear small and restrictive to advertisers from the outside, but actually have a mighty influence and reach.
Consider your own internet behaviour for a minute; maybe you’ll check an internet based email account? Visit a couple of news sites? Perhaps depress yourself on your online bank for while? The iTunes Store or YouTube might get a visit? You might make the odd purchase? Maybe you’ll see what’s happening on your preferred social networking site and definitely return a few times during the day to your nominated search engine. You will also, I’m sure, have a couple of sites related to your particular interests or hobbies that you will visit regularly Obviously I’m generalising, but all internet users have a degree of habitual routine about where they go and what they do online.
So what does increasingly informed consumer behaviour mean for advertisers? Are the opportunities to reach your customer in any way diminished by their net-savvy behaviour?
Well to give you the short answer, no. But it is extremely important to keep consumer behaviour and their growing internet experience in mind when considering your online presence.
Cracking the top 10
The top 10 sites do command a lot of traffic, but there exists a wealth of opportunities within them and importantly on the journeys to and from them. The leading websites on the internet enjoy the ‘Tardis effect’. In the respect they might appear small and restrictive to advertisers from the outside, but actually have a mighty influence and reach. Unfortunately they don’t also carry an alien doctor across time and space. Shame.
Consider eBay, for example. From the outside it would appear the auction site is just one site, but eBay has 212 million registered buyers and sellers and is segmented into a number of products and sub-products. In all intents and purposes it’s a number of niche stores under the banner of one auction site. From an advertiser perspective eBay can present you with a mass audience who might be looking for a new garden shed, for example, or alternatively you could target a niche market looking for Star Wars collectables.
The twenty-first century’s empowered and increasingly demanding consumer requires a marketer that knows who they are and an advertising medium that has the flexibility and targeting capabilities to reach them.
When you also consider the number of different routes your consumer might take on their way to one of the major websites, it’s clear to see there are numerous additional touch points where you can present your messages to them. Continuing with the eBay example, your consumer might end up on the auction site from a search engine, a price comparison site or even an online classified site.
Chasing the Long Tail
To really experience the unique benefits of the internet marketing space, however, advertisers should not necessarily get preoccupied with achieving a presence on the sites that command the mass audiences. The twenty-first century’s empowered and increasingly demanding consumer requires a marketer that knows who they are and an advertising medium that has the flexibility and targeting capabilities to reach them. Whether the internet is driving the shift in consumer behaviour or facilitating it is hard to fathom, but the theory of the Long Tail is presenting advertisers with a wealth of new opportunities.
For those unfamiliar with the idea of the Long Tail, it is a phrase that has come to signify the cultural and economic shift in focus away from a small amount of mass and mainstream markets to a huge amount of niche opportunities. The internet has removed many of the distribution and storage restrictions that meant a limited amount of product choice was pushed to the homogenised consumer. As Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail wrote on his blog), “In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.” Special interest sites might not deliver massive audiences to advertisers, but can deliver more relevant audiences to the right advertisers.
Within this consumer climate advertisers can afford to be more strategic with their campaigns then ever before. The developments in behavioural targeting mean that regardless of where your consumers are spending their time online, advertisers can reach them with targeted and personalised executions. To get the most of your campaign it’s vital that your media and creative agencies are working together from the earliest possible point. Let the media behaviour of your consumer feed into your creative and not just be a consideration further along in the process. Your consumers' internet experience could signal the start of a beautiful friendship.
