Are Behavior Based Ads Good For Publishers?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Much ado is made of privacy (for good reason). Lately, that ado has risen to a fevered pitch. Fantomaster wrote a comprehensive blog post on Google and privacy issues that will astound you. One of the links he provides is to this blog post by DazzlinDonna about her experience as a publisher using behaviorally-based ad targeting. In her view, it just wasn’t worth it.

According to Donna, there were two issues related to behavioral-based ad targeted that made it a big turn off for her:

1. Her users freaked out and thought that she, not the ad company delivering the ads, were spying on them;
2. She experienced a lousy CTR

Both of these are understandable. Privacy issues aside, though, the drawback for publishers (besides having ticked off site visitors and customers) is that ads that appear on their websites targeted to viewers based on their browsing habits are anti-SEO. That is, those ads will inevitably have nothing to do with your site’s content. That’s bad for you as it will lead to lower than expected click through rates (CTR). Who wants that?

Here’s how it works:

• Your site is about A
• Site visitor X frequents websites that feature content about B
• Ads seen by that visitor on your site more frequently show up to be related to B, not A
• Other site visitors see ads related to their viewing habits, which may or may not have anything to do with A
• Your click throughs go down

Now, here’s the golden question: Why do your click throughs go down? it seems that if ads appear to visitors based on their interests that CTRs would go up, right? Not really. There are two reasons why CTR could go down in this situation. The first is because visitors are on your site to see content about A and while they may ordinarily be interested in B (or C or D or E), at this time they are only interested in A. Secondly, if visitors get an eerie feeling that you are spying on them then they are going to be less likely to click on anything. Go figure.

My guess is, lower CTRs are a result of both of these phenomena working together, but mostly the freaked-out effect. Let’s face it. None of us want to be spied on and if we think people are hiding behind corners sneaking a peak at what we’re up to, we’re more likely to disappear and not do the thing that we were hoping to do. Human behavior is pretty much the same online as off line. Simply put, behavior-based advertising is bad for search engine optimization.