Canon Communications Launches Behavioral Targeting Ad Program

Initial tests showed a 49 percent increase in clickthrough rates.

By Bill Mickey
Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Canon Communications has launched a new advertising program that leverages behavioral targeting to dial in ad placement according to user behavior across the company's 45 Web sites.

According to Jason Brown, Canon's vice president of digital media, the behavioral program goes beyond the concept of placing the ads in the right content context. In general terms, advertising follows the user, rather than the content.

The b-to-b media company is using Boomerang, a behavioral advertising platform developed by Google-owned DoubleClick, and, according to Canon, initial tests yielded a 49 percent increase in clickthrough rates. EDN.com, a Web site targeting the electronics original equipment manufacturer market, will be the first site to roll out a full campaign using multiple clients.

Boomerang tracks users across a site, monitoring where each one browses, and develops segmented lists according to content groupings. These subsections of audience members can then be selected and targeted by advertisers that can develop messaging specific to these groups.

Brown says users are tagged with a cookie—no personable identifiable information is passed along—that records the content a user reads on a site. "When a certain trigger kicks in, say after a visitor reads three articles on 45NM Processors, or downloads a whitepaper on FPGAs, then the BTA software displays ads related to that tag regardless of where the user goes on the site," he says.

The cookie remains associated with that user for up to 30 days, so those same ads will stay with that user when he or she returns to the site. Further, if a user changes content habits, a new tag will be applied which triggers a new set of appropriate advertising. User engagement is monitored using DoubleClick's DART interface.

According to Brown, the platform took about four weeks to deploy. Setup involved making sure the content was appropriately tagged and the taxonomy was relevant to readers and advertisers. Canon pays a monthly service fee along with a CPM charge from DoubleClick. Revenues, says Brown, are based on a CPM model or fixed pricing on all of the Canon sites. "We'll be charging a premium for this service as we're targeting a smaller, defined and focused group of readers."

According to the company, the sites collectively attract 29 million unique visitors per year.