Proof that Placement of Ads Does Matter

In past studies Next Century Media found that online audiences respond to behaviorally targeted ads at an advanced rate than contextually positioned ads because of the clutter on context pages. The surprise of being provided a behavioral ad in an unexpected place also increased the audience's response.

Two types of measures that Next Century Media use are:

Evaluative measures - What happened
Diagnostic measures – Why they happened.

Next Century Media is more confident about their hypothesis that clutter of competing ads in the same category in contextual, versus behavioral targeting which are ads placed in areas with less clutter and enhanced by the surprise of seeing an ad that has nothing to do with surrounding editorial content of the page the audience is viewing. This drives the tendency for the audience to look longer and more at the same ads in the behavioral targeting setting. If you are interested in learning more about their past study read the whole story here.