How bad can digital targeting get

It turns out some DMPs are so bad at targeting that they're literally worse than random: they target your anti-audience.

A new study tested the accuracy of 90 third-party test audiences from 19 different data brokers with info from Pureprofile, Moat, and Nielsen.

The worst? A DMP that could only get people's gender right 26% of the time. (The best gender match was 63%, and the average for all brokers was 42%.) Flip a coin and at least you're right 50% of the time. Instead, you're buying your anti-audience.

The good news is that some DSPs could improve gender-and-age targeting by over 2X, which is probably worth the 1.5X cost increase.

The most accurate targeting, it turns out, was on people's interests (sports, fitness, & travel), with accuracies from 62% to 88%.

No wonder a quarter of polled advertisers say behavioral targeting has actually hurt revenue.

CAVEAT EMPTOR.

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