The ability to target online advertising has improved immensely in the years since pop-up banners flooded our screens. Social media and programmatic display platforms allow you to reach users based on their interests, with ads appearing on specific domains or content aligned with your creative. While there are many ways to get your ads exactly where you want them, many marketers are still not using all of the tools available to them. Learn what tactics you can use to better target your marketing campaigns to yield better results.
Running on the Correct Platforms
Every campaign has a specific goal and every digital advertising platform has its own way of helping you reach it. Whether you’re just trying to increase brand awareness or drive qualified leads, the right mix of ad types and delivery systems can make or break the success of your campaign.
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Paid Search on networks like Google and Bing allow you to rank for searches that you otherwise wouldn’t show up for organically. This is a great way to show ads to users when they are ready to convert for a specific product and an integral part of most campaign strategies. While other ad types might do a good job of increasing awareness and clicks, Paid Search is typically the closest to the end of the user journey.
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Social Media advertising on sites like Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin is a great way to get your messaging seen alongside user-generated organic content, increase awareness and drive users to learn more about your offerings. The data that these sites have about their users lets you granularly target audiences based on their specific interests, and also typically has a much lower cost than Paid Search advertising.
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Programmatic Display, which can include banner ads, video, audio streaming and OTT/CTV ads, is great at increasing overall awareness of your offerings across a multitude of websites at a low cost. This is also one of the easiest advertising types to set up improperly, because there are so many potential users who could see your ads across a multitude of different websites. These ads are great at driving brand awareness and typically lead to conversion after multiple ads are seen across several days.
Choose the Right Behavioral Audiences
If you’re running social or programmatic advertising one of the steps in getting ads scheduled is choosing your audience. While ads can be run only based on content, or contextual targeting (more on that in a minute), it’s more common to at least have some behavioral targeting guiding your ads towards the appropriate audiences.
Behavioral Audiences are determined by a number of factors, depending on who is providing them. Many programmatic display platforms will partner with providers who aggregate user data based on their browsing history, location history or submitted form data. Usually you can find audiences labeled as having interest in a specific product like In Market for Auto Loans or Likely First Time Home Buyer. While these are great choices based on their specificity, you can also target based on life stages such as Recently Married or Growing Family in order to reach users who may be interested but haven’t specifically browsed for those products yet.
When To Choose Remarketing
Remarketing, or retargeting, is when you show ads to a user based on their previous interactions with your website. This could be sitewide retargeting, meaning any visitor to your website could be shown an ad, or more dynamic retargeting where the ad they see is specific to products they have interacted with on your website. Using dynamic retargeting is especially helpful for abandoned carts, or users who showed interest in a product but didn’t convert. Remarketing audiences can be created by adding pixels to your websites that are provided by your chosen advertising platforms, or from uploaded first-party data such as email lists. Many ad platforms are able to match uploaded attributes like email addresses to user devices for remarketing purposes, but you should always make sure that your users agreed to opt-in for marketing purposes before uploading these lists.
Remarketing lists should only be used in specific remarketing campaigns separate from any advertising meant to reach potential new customers. This will allow you to separate your budget across reengagement and acquisition efforts, instead of lumping everything together into one campaign. Many ad platforms will also allow you to exclude audiences, meaning you can use remarketing lists for suppression purposes. When you add remarketing lists as excluded audiences you can ensure that the clicks you’re receiving are from new users.
Target Appropriate Content
When running programmatic display ads it’s important to target, as well as exclude, certain content. Users in your chosen audiences are likely browsing a wide variety of websites and apps, but that doesn’t mean you want to show your ads on all of them. While layering Behavioral and Contextual Targeting together usually requires a higher CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions) it will also yield better quality results and more engaged traffic with a higher likelihood of conversion.
One of the top categories of content, in terms of available impressions, is mobile games. Many mobile games are free but force users to watch ads in the app, which is not the best place to be seen even if that user is in your targeted audience. If possible, we recommend excluding mobile apps from your content targeting, as well as monitoring where your ads show to exclude specific games and apps if needed. Mobile gaming apps are also more likely to cause accidental clicks which inflate campaign performance metrics without actually driving traffic to your website.
The websites and apps where your ads are displayed don’t necessarily need to be focused on similar topics as your promoted products, especially if you are already doing behavioral targeting. The targeted content should at least be reputable websites where you wouldn’t mind your audience associating your brand with that site. Local and national news websites are a good start as they receive a lot of impressions from a wide range of users. You can also target categories of website and app that are similar to your promoted products or in-line with the interests of your audience including finance, travel, sports and health. During the run of your campaign you should monitor the domains where your ads are receiving impressions and clicks, and pause lower quality domains when necessary.
Tracking Conversions
One of the most important steps in making sure your campaign is performing well is to implement conversion tracking. This usually means adding a bit of code provided by the ad platform to your website, such as the Facebook Pixel. These scripts either track views of all pages, or are configured to alert the ad platform when a specific action has taken place.
Conversion tracking through pixels is especially important as they will often provide more attribution to your campaign than similar analytics reporting will. If a user sees an ad on social media, third-party website or app and then fills out a form the next day, it’s helpful to know that your ads are providing some lift. These are called Viewthrough Conversions (or Impression Conversions) and can be configured to fire within a window of time after seeing an ad. Some platforms will even tell you how long after an ad was seen that your Conversion took place. This data will help tell the full story of how your campaign is performing even if a user doesn’t click on the ad.
Many ad platforms are also built to optimize delivery towards Conversions. This means the users who see your ads, the sites where they appear and the creative that is shown are all based on recent data around who has triggered KPIs related to your campaign. Because of this, it’s important to tag only the most relevant campaign actions as Conversions so you’re correctly guiding the algorithm.
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Whether you’re running digital advertising internally or using a third-party vendor, ZAG Interactive’s team of digital marketing experts can review your campaigns and make recommendations to improve performance. If you’re looking for a partner to strategize, launch and manage your ongoing campaigns we have the experience and best practices to help you improve your marketing. Let's talk.