I received an email from Tradedoubler today announcing their intention to develop a behavioural targeting proposition across their affiliate and ad networks. A brave move and echoing what Platform A have intimated they will do through their acquisition of buy.at .
Why is it a brave move? Well behavioural targeting is still a remarkably emotive subject. The whole Phorm episode has caused a whole heap of controversy with reports that they are losing over £1million a month emerging recently.
The way that it works is that publishers/affiliates will allow Tradedoubler the ability to dynamically serve ads on their sites based on the users previous behaviour across the TD network. So for example, if a consumer has previously clicked on travel adverts on one site and then arrived at yours, TD will serve travel adverts on your site as it deems them more relevant.
This is fairly common now on display networks but will it work in affiliate marketing? Generally affiliate sites are fairly targeted and attract users who are looking for specific products. Having dynamically inserted ads will lower the affiliates ability to optimise their sites for the ads that are appearing. Therefore amongst the longer tail of affiliates I don’t see this having a great take-up.
However will it bring more larger publishers on to a CPA metric? I do see that there is scope in larger traffic sites who are prepared to accept advertising on a CPA basis instead of CPM if it can be demonstrated that conversion figures are sufficiently high to make it viable for them.
