Name: Targeted
Rating: 3.9 (15 reviews)
Author: Mike Smith

What’s in it for me? Get a glimpse into the secret world of modern advertising.

When advertising and modern psychology came together in the 1950s, a new, more potent kind of advertising was born. At this point, advertising started getting under our skin. Consumers were no longer just sold a product; they were sold an idea and a whole lifestyle based on their innermost desires. But, at the same time, they were all largely sold the same idea and lifestyle.

Since then, another revolution has taken place – the merging of modern technology with advertising. The one-message-for-all model is long gone. Advertising today is more sophisticated than ever before, targeting the individual directly.

But how does all this work behind the scenes?

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how to increase your Click Through Rate;
how Bill Gross revolutionized online advertising; and
why you need cookies to attract customers.

Targeting is the art of giving the right person what they want at the right time.

In the past ten years, computers, the internet and smartphones have created a digital revolution that has transformed our global economy. We now have the power to search for anything we want, anytime and anywhere.

This immediacy has created a new pressure on business to provide products to the right person at the right time – for the right price.

In one word: Targeting.

If a company is going to be successful in the digital economy, it must learn how to target.

This is because the variety of products on the market has exploded. Modern consumers have a clear idea of what they want, and won’t accept a product that is nearly right. But even if a company has created the perfect product for the consumer’s needs, it must also make that product easy to find, or else no one will buy it.

This is done via SEM or Search Engine Marketing. SEM means making the website that promotes a product as easy to find as possible so that the product is sold and consumers fulfill their needs.

This is done in two ways. First there is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, in which strategic web design optimizes the chance of placing a site high in the search rankings. Then there’s paid search, which we’ll look at in the next blink.

This new world of SEM has opened up a whole new market for advertisers. By combining information collected from search histories and cookies, advertisers can provide ads that pinpoint what consumers want to buy. And if they can acquire space on a high-traffic website like Google – either a high search ranking or a paid search ad – advertisers can offer millions of people exactly what they want.

Paid search is a great way to attract potential customers.

We’ve seen how important SEM is for companies who want to reach customers effectively. Now let’s take a deeper look at the different types of paid search, and how they work.

Paid search ads attract consumers to a website. They can take many forms: pop-ups, images, banners and videos, but also the use of paid keywords that bring up ads in a search engine.

Adding the element of bidding to paid-search advertising created a dynamic form of SEM.

Just as advertising has its own history, paid search has also evolved. Back in the early 1990s, paid search was completely static. It only allowed advertisers to buy a fixed ranking for a fixed period of time for a fixed price.

But in 1997, a digital mastermind was inspired by rate cards and auctions to make paid search dynamic.

Real-time bidding is a customer-centered, auction-like form of paid search.

For the most part, when we talk about modern paid search, we’re talking about real-time bidding. Let’s look at how it works in more detail.

Real-time bidding takes bidding for advertising to the next level. Instead of competing for a specific space, advertisers battle for specific users. This is made possible by automatic bidding and data collection. Let’s look at automatic bidding first.

Kernaussagen in Targeted