There are a number of sites that target advertising based on profile information, and then serve up Google ads. I'm sure you've been on lots of them yourself. I captured a screen shot from LinkedIn which nicely illustrates the current challenge of this kind of targeting.
Mostly, these ads are about other people like me, not about services I might like to buy.
Which I guess has its uses, such as monitoring who is advertising in your space. But this isn't likely to be helpful to the advertiser. It's so close, but it's not quite right.
The kinds of things I actually buy for the business are on a relatively small list. Qual researchers use sticky notes, index cards, felt pens, and flipchart paper in truly shocking quantities. We rent focus group facilities, and meeting facilities. We hire recruiters to find respondents for us. We use a lot of travel and hotel services. Like all businesses, we use software, computers and telecom. Some of us would buy specialized software or license various online applications like bulletin boards.
But hiring competitors is not a frequent activity. Nor is installing large scale CRM systems. I advise on these things sometimes, but would never be a buyer.
If I had the option, I could tell the company what services I would like to see advertising for, but that would put control in the users hands, not the advertisers. Surely that would improve effectiveness though.
I briefly tried adwords, and found that many of the click-throughs were coming from other organizations like mine, not from potential client companies. The irony of this is that I can define potential clients quite clearly -- I just can't easily target them using these tools.
I'm curious if others are experiencing this.
Are you being served relevant ads?
