Tips for improved targeting

For a display ad to be successful, it has to be personalised and speak to a specific person like a potential buyer, with a specific need, at a specific point in his or her buyer journey. Put another way, your ad has to be relevant. Well targeted ads reflect a deep understanding of your audience and where they are on their way down the path of the funnel.

In outdoor (street) advertising creative art-directors have known for years that relevance is key. See some great examples

To create these kinds of creative, personalised and relevant digital ads, you need an appropriate and specific message along with an image for your audience for every step in their journey. For example, depending on where your audience is in their buying process, it is appropriate to show your message in a video ad. Read more about this and our customised touch-tell-sell model. After creating the different creatives and types of ads, how do you make sure the right creative reaches the right person at the right moment?

Choosing the right targeting options for your campaigns will help you deliver a more relevant message when advertising online. We provide you with a variety of powerful targeting options that will help you reach the right audience. We outline some of our favourites below!

Tip 1 Geofencing targeting

A geofence is a virtual perimeter around a physical space such as a shop or a train station. It is possible to advertise to mobile devices that enter or leave the defined area. It is a powerful way to deliver highly targeted advertising on mobile devices. When applying geofencing be sure your message is a brief, location-relevant call to action, and it must be important enough to engage the targeted user. Imagine the powers of this targeting option in this world of always-on mobile devices. Don't wait for customers to find your store, pull them right in!

Tip 2 Cross screen synergy

Target your digital campaigns in a fully orchestrated fashion with offline above the line advertising, across all devices and screens. Research shows that display banner ads are better recognised when radio and/or TV advertising to enforce the campaign simultaneously. Digital advertising marketing channel "integration," such as search and social media, SEO and PPC, and search and ATL, ultimately allow all channels to work together and no longer in a silo for a maximum success. Your potential buyers move seamlessly between those silos all having their specific role in the customer journey.

With the current advertising technology for ad serving and measurement getting better, cookies are slowly falling behind. They don't work well on mobile, overstate reach and underestimate frequency. Cookies are becoming less accurate in demographic targeting and can't easily or accurately measure the customer purchase funnel across browsers and devices or into the offline world. What are the alternatives for cross device tracking?

Cross device targeting options by three big players

Facebook offers cross device targeting and retargeting via their unique identifier through the revised Atlas offering. Through its own platform but also via its acquisitions of Whatsapp and Instagram, Facebook owns an enormous amount of data which it intends to monetise both on Facebook and now with Atlas, as well as off-Facebook external media. Cross-device is a natural thing to Facebook since its users interact with the platform between devices seamlessly, making cross-device recognition, enriched with a huge amount of other data, easy and accessible.

Google also relies on the single sign-on strategy for its cross-device mapping. Logging into any Google account ties consumers to the entire Google network. Easy for the user and a wealth of information for Google. Many of Google's ad products pull in ad identifier information, creating a map of digital whereabouts. The websites your potential consumers visit tell plenty, and the information comes in handy when you want to target the right consumer at the right time on the right device.

Apple targets consumers based primarily on Apple ID account information. The login identity is tied to Apple' "identifier for advertisers," or IDFA. It's a unique, anonymous string of characters assigned to every user buying and using an iOS device.

Tip 3 Visibility targeting

You can target the viewability of your display ad from 10% to 90% and everything in between and for how long. Choose to target ONLY those impressions where your ad has a chance to be seen. We use Active View to make this happen. This DoubleClick Marketing (DCM) feature is an integrated metric to target the viewability of impressions across the web. Moving from served impressions to viewable impressions as the standard unit of targeting in the advertising ecosystem is a huge shift we fully support for our clients, making a huge impact on actual advertising ROI. Read more

Tip 4 Data targeting

Targeting based on external data or exchange data is still relevant. We help you pay the right price for the right data by looking carefully to the recency and integrity of the offered data. Sometimes this means we will use partner data from handpicked publishers. Targeting your ads based on reliable '2nd partner data' will commonly mean a boost for your results. Relevant and transparent data provided by these publishers makes data easier to quantify and use for campaigns.

Tip 5 Content and context targeting

To reach a large audience interested in content relevant to your business, you can contextually target pages about specific topics. With contextual targeting you will match your ads to relevant web pages. Contextual targeting delivers relevant messages to users based on the type of content they consume. Contextual targeting has evolved a lot, going from static keywords to page categories, video context and deep content targeting being made available by publishers. You can connect with interested consumers at the exact moment they're actively engaged in highly relevant content. Less obvious is using Ad call data for your contextual targeting. Instead of targeting on a weather channel, you can target based on current weather conditions.

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