Remember when you were telling your friends about that new clothing website you saw an online advertisement for? Or when you were searching for the right office chair and Amazon recommendations started showing up everywhere? That’s because of targeted ads.
These ads help customers know what businesses exist in the market, and what products and services they offer. As a business, it’s important to reach out and build your brand, and you can do that with the right advertising strategy. The most effective way to go about doing that is by ad targeting. Join us as we illustrate what ad targeting is, and the types of targeting that exist in marketing.
Ad targeting is a fascinating concept. It is a way of showing the most relevant ads to the earmarked audience. It’s when you identify which audience is the most optimum for a product and ensure that the product is specifically marketed to them.
The optimum audience of a product is identified by sex, age, education and income levels, employment, lifestyle, interests, etc. You may ask, “well, how do we find these people?”, and so we’re here to tell you, it is very simple! Complex ad algorithms use data points like browser history, payment history, and other online activities so that they don’t spend their time, energy, and money marketing to just everyone. That would be like fumbling for a light switch in the dark!
An example of this would be a company that sells necklaces and pendants. The algorithm might pick up the website traffic to a page, (like Amazon), figure out who all are interested in buying pendants, and then show them ads related to the topics that they browsed.
Ads targeting can be most easily done online and worked on by bots, but it has been around in traditional advertising too.
Don’t believe us? Here’s a fun story:
When Michael S. Dell (yes, the now CEO of Dell Technologies) started a job selling newspaper subscriptions as a teenager, he first identified who his target audience would be, newlyweds and people who had just bought homes in his town, and catered to them. That year he made $18,000 in one year, more than his history teacher made!
If that isn’t proof enough of the benefits of targeting, here’s some more!
Targeting connects your organization to the specific people that are interested in your product. Using a strategy helps market the product to increase leads. Let’s go into detail to understand why ad targeting is so beneficial:
• The main aim of ad targeting is to help you reach the right audience.
• The cost of advertising is reduced tremendously; you show the right ads to the right people at the right times instead of popping ads up everywhere, for long durations, on every screen.
• Results could be instantaneous! The second the ads are reaching the right people, you will see that your return on investment is jumping through the roof.
• You can use these to re-engage customers, if there’s something that they were looking at but didn’t buy, possibly because they didn’t find what they were looking for, showing them the options that they have is so useful.
• The most important benefit: as a seller, you have an in-depth understanding of what is expected of you, what masses are coming to you, and what they want.
Now that we have assured you of the importance and benefits of ad targeting, let’s look at the different types to identify which best suits your brand.
Let us walk you through all the different types of ad targeting. Different strategies are important for different businesses. A social media-based business that posts art would see the best results when they use time targeting, and geotargeting is more or less irrelevant to them, at the same time, a localized business needs to focus on geotargeting.
This type of targeting works with a special focus on customers’ characteristics; how old they are, their gender, income levels, nationality, and so on. This targeting is crucial to understand the market for advertising campaigns.
Behavior targeting is easy to explain. You are an individual customer on the internet, researching a topic or reading blogs (like the one about ads targeting on our website!). Every click your customer makes, every website they browse, and how long they spend there, create a profile. It contains patterns from their search history so that they get ads for what they are interested in. For more information about behavioral targeting, read this.
Here, search engines are used to reach target audiences. The best case of this would be Google’s Remarketing Campaign. Google keeps track of customers’ browsing history and keywords used. Later, advertisers use their IP address to promote products they viewed but did not buy.
Some marketers prefer to put ads on related web pages for maximum sales, instead of randomly placing ads everywhere online, which is not just expensive but also irrelevant content to your target customer. An example of this would be Adidas propping ads on sports blog pages.
This one is really interesting! Potential buyers’ location is used to publish ads for location-dependent products and services. If you are a taxi service that operates in a given city only, it would do well to reach out to IP addresses within the locations that you cater to.
Time targeting is publishing adverts when users show the highest online activity. Peak timings on Instagram/ Facebook could be 8- 10 pm when everyone is finished with their day and scrolling in bed. Showing them ads for what they’re interested in when most people are online is so wholesome!
• Are you based online only?
• Work with social media?
• Or is your product/ service offered localized in nature?
By identifying which type of targeting is most useful to your business and applying it, you can start deriving the advantages that it offers. Learning which form works for your business will happen by trial and error, but the results will make it worth it, but if you wish to make it worth a while without any errors, we’re just the sign you’re looking for! As professionals in the field of Digital Advertising and Marketing, we recommend starting here.
Bright Brain is a Digital Marketing and Advertising Agency with a focus on building digital solutions for Branding and Increased Sales efficiency. Our expertise includes Digital Advertising, Campaigmust-have Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Development, and Online Branding. Our Google Partnership brings a unique opportunity to work with the internal team at Google, adding even more value to our team & clients.
Suhail Bajaj is the CEO of BrightBrain Marketing Technologies LLP that has now grown into a full-fledged digital marketing agency with 55+ employees and clients from 7+ countries – all under his supervision. Graduated with an MBA from the esteemed Cass Business School, he brilliantly puts his learnings into practice, helping brands meet their business goals and succeed in a digital-first world.
