Targeted Advertising

When looking to promote your company’s products or services, you must first consider your target audience to identify who is most likely to purchase something from your business. Once this is established, you can direct your focus to optimizing your delivery via targeted advertising—the process by which ads are intentionally served to specific audiences.

With data playing an integral role in digital marketing, there are now several ways to make sure your advertisements are placed on the best-fit websites. This will drive more website traffic, increase your sales and satisfy your customers.

Contextual Targeting

This cost-efficient targeted advertising method is an effective way to ensure your ad is delivered to the most receptive audience. By looking at specific keywords or categories that reside on the page a user is viewing, contextual targeting can present ads based on the user’s unique goals and interests.

How Does It Work?

With contextual targeting, a web crawler collects information about a web page and passes it onto an ad server. Using this data, the server can match relevant campaigns to a page’s subject matter.

The most popular form of contextual targeting is through keyword usage. This process begins when an advertiser includes pertinent keywords in their ad’s copy. This ultimately directs consumers to your company’s page when they’re searching for that keyword. Once the keywords are entered, advertising technology allows for web pages to be crawled to determine the content’s relevance. A page’s relevance is matched with the inputted keyword(s), and the ad is placed for consumers to view.

For example, if your furniture company is promoting its latest line of outdoor furniture, you want to have your ad shown on home decor and backyard design websites. This will attract people looking to purchase similar items. To fulfill this goal, using keywords like “deck furniture,” “patio table” and “outdoor seating” will allow your ad to be matched with the most fitting websites.

Contextual keyword targeting optimizes purchasing intentions because it captures people’s attention when their engagement for specific content is at its peak. When viewers’ interests are sparked, click-through rates (CTRs) are likely to increase conversion rates.

Another contextual targeted advertising method is through site categories that group web page content by topic. Ads are served on pages that fall within contextual categories defined by the Internet Advising Bureau (IAB), such as automotive, health and fitness or travel. You may also decide to use both categories and keywords for your ad campaign.

Geo-Targeting

A person’s location can say a lot about their mindset at any given moment because where they are could reflect what they want to do—or buy. Keeping this in mind, geo-targeting is the process of delivering content, specifically ads, to individuals based on their geographic location. In an era of constant mobile device usage, this targeted advertising tool can help your company reach the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

Geo-targeting provides businesses with the opportunity to connect with their audience through a highly personalized approach. From sending out alerts promoting deals and discounts only offered in a specific region to improving the user experience by adapting to the language and currency of the consumer’s country of origin, geo-targeting flourishes through customization.

How Does It Work?

Geo-targeting can be performed by tracking an individual through their IP address, mobile device ID or through geofencing. This is the process of establishing a radius around a campaign to allow for marketers to serve a location-based message to a user when they’re within that boundary.

When setting the geographical parameters for geofencing, global position system (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) can be used to create a “fence” around your specified location. This could outline a city’s boundaries to reach people entering and leaving the area. Once an individual enters the geofenced area, an ad can be delivered to them.

For example, if your clothing company is having a week-long sale on t-shirts at a specific store location, geo-targeting enables you to connect with the people who are in the store’s vicinity. It lets your ad apprise potential customers of opportunities in their area based on where they are in real time.

Behavioral Targeting

Personalization is key when it comes to ad placement and web behavior is a tell-tale sign of someone’s interests and purchasing intentions. Behavioral targeted advertising consists of compiling rich user information, like purchase and search history. This data is used to build a profile linked to a user’s web browser. The profile will prompt specific ads to be displayed on the user’s web page.

How Does It Work?

While a user is surfing the web, their web browser will store small pieces of data, called “cookies” on their computer. Let’s put this into context. A person may spend 10 minutes scrolling through a page selling running sneakers before closing their browser. While they may not make a purchase, an ad for those sneakers—or other shoes from the same website—may show up during the individual’s next internet session to appeal to their previous interest. While cookies are mostly desktop-relevant, they’re not the only component to behavioral targeting.

Data Management Platforms (DMPs) are used to collect, analyze and apply data from all devices to build custom target audiences. Once your company’s target audience is identified, you can obtain a more comprehensive understanding of who should see your ads. By tracking a user’s internet activity, such as their page visits, how long they stay on those pages, the searches they make and the links the click, DMPs can piece together an individual’s behavior and determine what’s most likely to pique their interest.

With such detailed insight into a consumer’s behavior, DMPs will allow for the display of the most hyper-targeted, relevant ads, meeting both your business’s goals and and your customers’ needs.

The digital marketing space is ever-evolving, and it’s important to stay ahead of the curve with targeted advertising to increase your reach. Here at Bridge, we offer an array of campaign services to help you boost the success of your company’s ads. With our experienced digital advertising team and audience targeting tools, we’ll help you pinpoint exactly where your ads should be placed.