US news sites fail to target advertising

Given the relative ease of targeting users by their online browsing behaviours, particularly for big, frequently visited sites, you might have thought that the major online US newspapers would have been extensively using this internet marketing capability already. However, a new study covered on SearchEngineWatch suggests that this is not the case.

According to the study, from the Pew Research Centre, just three out of the 22 sites they examined appeared to use high levels of ad targeting. In these examples, just under half, 45 per cent, or more of advertising differed from one user to the next. The three sites that delivered the highest targeting were the New York Times, with 47 per cent, CNN with 45 per cent, and Yahoo News perhaps unsurprisingly leading the pack at 67 per cent. Three other sites, CBS, USA Today and MSNBC, were reported as having somewhere between 29 per cent and 40 per cent of ads differing between online readers. Some sites with little or no apparent targeting included FoxNews.com, WashingtonPost.com and Newsweek.com

Google was spotted as having a strong presence on the news sites, usually powering the small, box-like sponsored link ads that were seen on 38 per cent of the sites. A quarter of the ads observed were actually in-house ads, advertising the brands' own products such as subscriptions or other papers, and just under half, 46 per cent, were simple static banners.

By not targeting more ads to their usually large consumer bases, it would seem that these major news brands are missing a trick and could be at risk of losing ad revenue to better-equipped publishers, a potential disaster in these recessionary times.