> I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted.
The devil in the detail is how well the targeting is done.
Is there a big difference between poor targeting & untargeted? Not really.
Is there a big difference between good targeting & untargeted? Massive amounts of data to say yes.
I'd like to see some data which was collected in a quantifiable, carefully controlled and rigorous way. I'm not trying to be snarky or saying it doesn't exist, I'd just like to see some credible data.
I was able to find this study after banging my head against a bunch of paywalled sites trying to charge money for public domain research:
Working on reading through. Seems like it would be difficult to control an experiment like this, since the subjects know they will be seeing advertisements as part of a study and won't really be purchasing these items. I don't know, I'm looking forward to learning more about the experimental procedure. Also they seem to be measuring somewhat vague self-reported impressions about the ad in context of being targeted / untargeted, not the actual sales they produce. Drawing a line between these impressions and real ad performance seems to be mostly a matter of opinion. As I said it seems like a tough thing to quantify, and I'm hoping that people smarter than myself have found credible methods to truly measure it.
The devil in the detail is how well the targeting is done.
Is there a big difference between poor targeting & untargeted? Not really.
Is there a big difference between good targeting & untargeted? Massive amounts of data to say yes.