Making Pay Per Click Targeting More Accurate

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August 18th, 2008 by Click Consult

The 2 largest social networking sites on the web today, are planning to make online marketing and pay per click (PPC) easier. While pay per click advertising is very accurate when it comes to search marketing. Display ads and the content network have always struggled to offer the same potential ads would previously need to be targeted to sites based on their demographics or content that you assume your targets would be interested in. This could either by completely off the mark or very low volume.

This week facebook and Myspace have both announced plans for a cross web login. The system, previously used by Microsoft on their portal MSN & Live, will allow users to login to multiple sites with one ID. Yahoo have a similar system relating to the Yahoo mail and other online properties such as Flickr. From a user aspect, an open ID or net passport will save the need for multiple user names and passwords, letting them roam free across the worldwide web.

For marketers this has huge potential to open up demographic targeting relating to content advertising, search marketing and display advertising. As users will still be logged in to their profiles, it will no doubt become possible to target specific demographics such as age, employment status and even interests.

Microsoft have always had the potential for demographic targeting with the data pulled from Microsoft’s Hotmail profiles. This had potential, but the likelihood of users keeping their email profile updated was slim. Myspace and facebook profiles are updated daily by many and in some cases even more often!

Facebook’s own advertising system currently allows this level of targeting, but the platform basis is currently not very favourable to use with large scale managed campaigns. A net passport system could open this up to Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcentre users as there are ties with Myspace and Facebook respectively.

The other effects this has on pay per click and online marketing would be in the battle between the search engines. The Facebook and Myspace competition is dwarfed by the battle between Google and Microsoft and both social networking sites have been used in the past. In this stage Microsoft could have the upper hand as they have a partnership with facebook. The users of Facebook have more potential as it’s demographics are heavily weighted to those in/of higher education, therefore more likely to have the disposable income. Myspace users are typically younger. The information on Facebook is more regimented and could be easier to use than the more free run of the average Myspace user page.

If set up and run correctly, this could be the big drive of traffic to Microsoft adcentre we have all been waiting for.

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