Personalised advertising is the latest innovation for websites, who are increasingly able to tailor their adverts to their visitor’s interests in an attempt to provide relevant advertising. Social media websites such as Facebook, and email servers such as Gmail have been using adverts which are targeted to the information you give to the site upon joining for a long time, but this technology is evolving very quickly.
Now real time adverts are being trialed on 1% of users profiles (more than 5million people)– a service which allows immediate targeted adverts based on what they are posting about, or updating their status about at the time. So if someone posted “I’d like to go to the cinema tonight”, an advert from Vue or Odeon may instantly appear alongside their Facebook homepage.
Similarly, real time targeted advertising has been pioneered by Twitter, which houses promoted Tweets – paid-for brand tweets – next to relevant topics of conversation. Twitter are also trialing geo- targeted adverts, which allows advertisers to narrow down their promoted tweets to users within a specific geographical location, and this is being closely monitored to measure its successes.
This is definitely something that businesses need to be looking into because they could be missing out on something big!