Audience Targeting 101: Showing Your Ads to the Right People

Audience targeting is a salient feature of online marketing, making it more practical than offline marketing. Billboard advertising can cost your business as much as $8,000. While you spend so much money hoping for better brand awareness, you can’t gauge who are the people seeing your ad. The effectiveness of an ad campaign dilutes when it is shown to a number of people who might or might not convert. On the other hand, online ads can be easily measured and precisely targeted.

Let’s learn how to show your ads to the right people.

Digital marketers use audience targeting to make sure that their ads are shown to the people who are most likely to convert. The targeting is based on interests, behaviors, and individual characteristics. So, only the selected group of people will be shown the particular ad campaign.

Most businesses think they know their target audience until they observe the data and realize that the people who are actually buying their products are different from the target group they have mapped out. By targeting the audience correctly, you can be assured that the budget will be spent in the right place. It will help you to get the most out of your money and improve the conversion rate.

The three components of audience targeting are:

Behavioral Audience Targeting

It is based on the behavior of the audience in the digital eco-system; for example, the purchases they have made, websites they have visited, or the products left in their cart, etc. Showing ads of an oat milk brand to people who have brought vegan products in the past is an example of behavioral audience targeting.

Interest-Based Audience Targeting

This kind of targeting segregates the audience based on activities, opinions, interests, lifestyle choices, personality traits, etc. Targeting people interested in Italian cuisine would be an example of interest-based audience targeting.

Demographic Audience Targeting

It thrives on demographic data such as gender, age, education level, race, income, occupation, relationship status, etc. If you want to show your ad to men who are over 40 years, earn $70,000 or more a year and are graduates, then demographic audience targeting is the way to go.

These elements can be combined or used separately to customize audience groups.

Types of Audience Targeting Data

The soul of audience targeting is data. But what is it, and where does it come from? How can you use it to benefit your business?

There are three types of data sets you can use to attract your target audience. These are:

• First-Party Data

It is a kind of data that a brand collects from its resources. It includes information about leads, past customers, social media followers, newsletter subscribers, website visitors, etc. Some data can be easily collated from your CRM or POS software. You can use cookies and pixels for tracking specific pages and the behavior of people visiting our website.

The scope of first-party data is limited and might inhibit you from reaching a new audience if you’re only dependent on it. It is where second-party and third-party data come into the picture.

• Second-Party Data

This type of data is usually someone else’s first-party data. It’s usually bought from or shared by someone in the same industry. It is less popular than first and third-party data. However, you can still use it for broadening your target group.

• Third-Party Data

If you are familiar with programmatic advertising, you must have heard of terms like DSPs and DMPs. If not, then you must read this blog on Programmatic Advertising, The Power of Programmatic Advertising in Scaling Your Business.

Data providers collect, segment, and sell third-party data. They buy it from public data exchanges, data management platforms (DMPs), and demand-side platforms (DSPs).

Businesses can use third-party data to quickly scale up their advertising campaigns. It allows businesses to expand and reach unique audience groups.

Now that you know where you can source data for showing your ads to the right people, let’s talk about how to use it.

How to Use Data for Audience Targeting

Audience targeting can be used wherever you want to show ads to your audience in the digital world. It includes paid search (Google ads), paid social ads (Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.), and programmatic.

Social media channels have in-built dashboards which are relatively easy to handle. It lets you choose attributes of your target group from a wide range of audience targeting options. However, it is limited to one particular platform and requires human intervention in most of the stages. 

If your goal is to rapidly increase brand awareness and reach a new audience, you must consider programmatic ads. Its scope reaches far and wide across multiple channels including mobile, display,  OTT platforms, native and audio ads. US programmatic ad spending is expected to reach $271 billion by 2025. Businesses all around the world are running successful online campaigns with the help of programmatic advertising.

Joining hands with a programmatic ad tech service provider like Jupyter Analytica will give you access to a pool of data points that you can leverage to improve your audience targeting and get more return on your marketing spend . You can also choose multiple data sets based on the attributes of your target group. This way, you will get access to high-quality data sets and a campaign manager, who will make sure that you’re getting the best bang for your buck.