Targeted advertising is more persuasive, but no better at getting views

How effective is targeted advertising ? This study attempted to find out by conducting a real world experiment. They used available data of Facebook "likes" to assess whether users were more likely to be introverted, extroverted, of high or low openness, and sent them correspondingly targeted adverts for beauty products and apps. This improves the effectiveness of the advertising (initial clicks and sales) by ~40%. However, the base rate is very low, ~0.3%, but the sample size is very large (>100,000 users). So it has an effect, but it turns a very low success rate into a slightly less very low success rate. Doesn't mean that isn't important, of course, but it's hardly dramatic. They note that other factors such as current mood might also be important, so further increases may be possible.

This more or less pans out the way I would have expected : advertising works, but not very well, and targeted adverts work better, but only slightly. But there are major caveats. The targeted personality types were extremely broad and based off very limited data. As far as fake news goes, adverts are usually explicitly labelled and easy to spot even if they're not. News doesn't carry such a label, so the click through rate may be much higher.

People are exposed to persuasive communication across many different contexts: Governments, companies, and political parties use persuasive appeals to encourage people to eat healthier, purchase a particular product, or vote for a specific candidate. Laboratory studies show that such persuasive appeals are more effective in influencing behavior when they are tailored to individuals’ unique psychological characteristics. However, the investigation of large-scale psychological persuasion in the real world has been hindered by the questionnaire-based nature of psychological assessment. Recent research, however, shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.

Capitalizing on this form of psychological assessment from digital footprints, we test the effects of psychological persuasion on people’s actual behavior in an ecologically valid setting. In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically tailored advertising, we find that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases.

Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to-experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts. Our findings suggest that the application of psychological targeting makes it possible to influence the behavior of large groups of people by tailoring persuasive appeals to the psychological needs of the target audiences.

PDF document.
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