The worst ad

At Bango, we love great targeting. That’s why we’ve just bought the worst billboard in the UK.

According to ClearChannel data, no billboard in the country gets seen by fewer people. This is it, the bottom of the ad targeting barrel.

Still, we’re happy with our billboard. In fact, we’re confident that it’ll get more relevant eyeballs than a PPC advert shown at the top of Google.

Why? Because search targeting is broken.

Having run experiments with over 65,000 search ad impressions, our data shows that more than a third of search ads never reach the audience. For those that did, more than a quarter still failed to reach anyone in the market to buy.

That’s why we’re sticking with our lonely billboard… because it’s still more targeted than your average search ad.

“One in every three ad dollars spent goes down the drain… before the campaign’s even started!”

This matters.

Ok, our lonely billboard is obviously a PR stunt. But get this — last year $171 billion was spent on search advertising around the world.

If more than a third of ads displayed are being shown to the wrong audiences, that means more than $60 billion (!) of that marketing budget was completely wasted.

Search advertising takes marketers’ money on the promise that its big data targeting is more accurate than anything else. It’s not. What people search for is rarely an accurate indication of what they will go on to buy.

If you’re going to target new audiences find buyers for your products and services, you need to target the handful who are actually in market to make a purchase. That means targeting based on purchase behavior, not just search history.