Behavioural Targeting: Mecca or Minefield?
With unlimited bytes of data available to internet service providers, auction sites such as EBay, search engines, and social networks, businesses are naturally seeking an edge by targeting advertising to the interests of users, as determined by browsing habits.
For recruiters, behavioural targeting is exciting because it lets us target passive jobseekers who aren’t actively searching for a new job, but who might be interested in learning more if the right opportunity came along. According to Recruiter magazine, this could include anywhere from 80% to 95% of the working population.
For example, if you wanted your advert to be seen by people who work in the charity sector, your advert could be shown to users who are logging onto your site from an ‘.org.uk’ domain name, used by most UK charities. For an even more targeted campaign, if you were recruiting for a marketer for a charity, you could have your advert seen only by those who logged on from an .org.uk domain and have looked at three or more pages of marketing editorial in the last week.
Putting your role in front of a highly targeted audience of passive jobseekers leads to extra response from ideal candidates. Not everyone is pleased, however. The European Commission has raised a number of concerns about the collection of online data, and is looking for stronger enforcement of existing regulation.
Glenn Lester, one of our Sourcing Channels Specialists, points to Google’s content network advertising as an excellent example of the future of targeted advertising. “It’s useful to us because it matches keywords selected in our campaign to content that a user views across their network of sites. For example, we had a campaign to recruit engineers, where we had selected keywords related to engineering jobs and the client’s banner advert then appeared on relevant websites, such as niche engineering job boards. Google content campaigns are generally for branding purposes, but they contribute to the success of a Google AdWord campaign, delivering approximately one third of the total clicks received.”
One thing is for sure, over the next few years we will see growth in the percentage of ad space and ad budgets being devoted to behavioural targeting methods.