Advertising is the backbone of any marketing strategy. It’s a way you get to promote your brand whilst drawing potential customers to your business. One advertising model to help you generate the most exposure for your business is targeted advertising.
A robust understanding of targeted advertising will help you boost your sales and also establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
In this guide, you’d discover what targeted advertising is, and how you can use it to grow a more profitable business today.
Targeted advertising draws customers by using their desires, specific traits, and interests. It’s a digital advertising model that draws the right audience by leveraging their browsing history and online behavior. If you’re a heavy internet user, you must have come across websites with cookies.
These cookies save user information like login details and track user’s behavior on a website. Cookies are digital files that enable advertisers to collect and track users’ behavior across the web.
To get the best out of their advertising endeavors, marketers use targeted advertising to launch personalized and relevant ads to the target audience.
Here are some targeted advertising types you should know.
Contextual targeting involves launching your ad with other similar content that relates to what you’re selling. One way of doing this is using keywords on your ads. This way, ad publishers get to match your ad with relevant content.
For instance, if you’re watching some sports highlights, the ad placed before the highlights may be running shoes or some energy drinks. These ads resonate more with the audience because it matches their genuine desire.
Behavioral advertising monitors how users spend time online and place ads that align with the user’s behavioral pattern. Behavioral patterns could be the pages they follow, the ads they click on, and their purchase history.
Just like behavioral advertising, social media targeting follows the user’s history. Users get adverts that align with their level of interest. Marketers have the option to optimize their ads and decide who sees their ad content. There’s also the option of measuring your ad performance using analytics — and that’s what differentiates it from regular billboard advertising.
Geo-targeting targets users within a specified region. Local companies use location-based advertising to drive traffic to their business. Information like postal codes, IP addresses, states, cities, and countries are used to optimize their geo-targeting ads.
Retargeting involves reaching out to people who have visited your website without purchasing your product. It can be done using social media, email marketing or specifically retargeted campaigns. For instance, if you’ve visited a website that sells running shoes, you may see lots of ads about the product as you scroll through your social media feed.
Retargeting helps you stay on top of your customer’s mind even after they have left your website. And if done well, you may generate some sales with it.
You’ve got to figure out the type of devices your target audience are using, and the time of the day they’d probably be online. Targeting the right audience with the right device and at the right time of day is a sure way of maximizing your brand exposure.
Your target audience will most likely engage with an ad that is properly optimized for their device. And if you want to generate the most traffic, you’ve got to reach out to your audience when they’re mostly online.
For instance, if your target audience are students, having your ads in the evening is arguably the best way to maximize traffic.
To get the best results, you need to keep a close eye on your targeted ads. One of the sure ways of doing that is by monitoring things like:
Regardless of how good you are, you’d need an analysis tool like the PPC Signal tool. Here are some benefits of using the PPC Signal tool.
Your competition is probably one-dimensional. They are either monitoring one metric like device or location. It’s almost always impossible for the competition to monitor two dimensions all at once. And that’s where tools like the PPC Signal tool come in.
The PPC Signal tool helps you see on all fronts, and you get to see the best possible way to optimize your campaign for improved results.
Unlike other tools on the market, the PPC Signal tool monitors behaviors over time by using AI enabled algorithms. Other tools on the market pretty much show only stats while this tool detects good vs. bad, and shows anomalies as well, which make it more flexible by letting you know how device like desktop is performing comparing to mobile and interaction with the ads is increasing but conversions are not increasing then it needs attention to change the campaign strategy.
The PPC Signal tool offers the flexibility of analyzing metrics and representing the results in the charts.
Here is what the PPC Signal dashboard looks like.
From the image above, there’s an option for filtering your campaign using options like Geo, Device Type, and Metrics. Your preferred filter should be relevant to your campaign. After selecting a filter, the PPC Signal tool gets to deliver insights that relate to your filter.
You can opt to explore your insight by clicking on the Explore icon. After that, you get to see more information about your preferred filter option. Here are some filter options that are worth considering.
The screenshot below shows you how to track your keywords.
The image above shows you all information that relates to the campaign keywords.
The screenshot below shows how your campaign is tracked with respect to the device type.
From the image above, you get to see the device and related devices targeted during the campaign. You also get to see the anomaly (if there is any).
In PPC campaigns, Geo means location. The image below shows you how to track your campaigns with respect to the Geo (location).
The image above shows you related locations in your campaign.
The screenshot below shows you how to track your campaign with respect to the hour of the day.
The screenshot below shows you how to track your campaign with respect to the metrics.
The image above shows you metrics that relate to your campaign. They are usually displayed as signals, and a combination of these two metrics indicates anomaly.
PPC Signal has gone a one step ahead by showing search term analysis which triggered your ads.
If you can see the Magnifier Icon in your PPC Signal application then you can easily find the search term related analysis under this section.
In top section the filter section is provided based on different parameter. Now let’s change that and see how the result change we pick the search term by Clicks and N-Gram value as 4.
N-Gram shows the number of words in search term. Now you can see that all those search terms are showing that has four words in a phrase, in other words they are long tail keywords.
If you scroll down the page you will see the tabular view of the data.
You can see the N-Grams and Search Terms Individually. N Grams are actually the derived version of the keywords combination from the main search terms.
If you think that particular search term is draining your budget and not needed in your campaign any more you can find on right side of the table to make an action in red color icon when you click on it you can easily add this selected keyword in the negative list of the campaign.
On the other hand if you think this search term is good and giving you good impressions, clicks and leading to conversions then why not to use in your campaign and make a part of the campaigns’ ad groups. You can easily do that by clicking on green icon and then select your campaign and ad group in just few clicks.
There is another way of viewing the data in detail view. If you want to know which search term triggered your ad for which campaign and for which ad group then you can simply click on Hierarchal selection and see the results as shown below.
Just imagine if you have multiple campaigns let’s say up to 100 and each campaign has different ad groups. Each ad group has different keywords. And your campaigns are targeted to different locations, different devices will you be able to optimize them efficiently if you don’t know which campaign is performing well and which is not?
Which keyword is good for which campaign? Which search term is draining your budget and which location is just giving you clicks and no conversions.
So PPC Signal is a diversified AI enabled tool which help to analyze your campaign with different angles in no time and keep your effort fruitful by knowing your all target campaigns performance under one umbrella.
Targeted advertising is a reliable way of growing your business. However, it’s not a rosy strategy — there are lots of ups and downs when it comes to this advertising technique. Here are some pros and cons of targeted advertising you need to consider.
To get started with targeted advertising, you’ve got to set up campaigns on ad networks. These networks typically display ads to users, and filters like online behavior, buying history, or demographics are usually considered.
To collect user data, advertising platforms use tools like cookies — and these cookies are placed on the websites. But what are cookies? They are tiny files that are capable of storing information about the user’s onsite purchases or actions. This information gets to be transferred to third-party services or customer relationship management (CRM) tools.
Another platform where users’ information is stored is in search engines. When users make search queries on search engines, their information is stored — and these data are used to optimize ads that are displayed to the users on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Now you know how advertisers who manage websites and search engines get customer data, how do they curate user information on social media platforms? Well, user data is typically found on social media profiles. People store information like gender, age, preferences, and beliefs on their social media profiles. And these data are curated for advertising purposes.
Using your online behavior and browsing history, advertisers get to show you targeted ads on their websites. Let’s say you’re searching for running shoes on a website, you may get running shoe ads from similar websites in the same industry.
Targeted ads are usually used to show you ads about products you’ve previously checked up on — and that’s what retargeting is all about. Retargeting is a sure way to rekindle the customer’s interest — and that would probably lead to a sale.
Targeted advertising helps position adverts in front of an audience who would be highly interested in the ad. These ad campaigns are more effective in the long run.
Targeted advertising helps in broadcasting different ads to a varying audience and it’s dependent on what the audience will be interested in. If a business has a good grasp of its customer persona, it will be much easier to convert its target audience.
There are behavioral, psychographic, geographic, and demographic segments. However, there are other variations of these four main target markets.
Businesses usually target customers by age or gender. For instance, women’s clothing shops direct their promotional content to women. On the flip side, men’s clothing businesses focus their marketing efforts on men. Some businesses use specific age groups while running marketing campaigns.
Target marketing involves narrowing your marketing efforts so you get to reach people who are more interested in your product or service offering. In the long run, you’d generate more engagement whilst building a community of loyal paying customers.
Targeted advertising is good, but you won’t get the most out of it by manually monitoring your campaign. To generate the best result, you’d need to use a monitoring tool like the PPC Signal tool.
The PPC Signal tool offers a lot of filter options to help you refine and optimize your campaign for better performance. The tool uses a data-driven approach to help you generate the most returns on your investment.
To get the best result from targeted advertising, you’ve got to know who your customer persona is, and how to craft messages that appeal most to them.
Now you know what targeted advertising is, and have seen some targeted advertising examples, what product or service offering will you be marketing in your next promotional campaigns?
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