How To Target Your Display Ads For Success? — Part 1

Published in

Inside Revenue

8 min readNov 19, 2018

The Beginner’s Guide

Display advertising is widely used to ensure your brand can be seen everywhere on the general web. It is for this reason that we decided to look into this topic. Display advertising when used in conjunction with Social Platforms can ensure that your brand is seen no matter where your potential customers are browsing on the internet.

This is vital as most companies will get researchers to look for possible solutions when they have a problem that they need fixed. People will search the internet for these solutions, and you want your brand to be seen as one of the solutions.

Whether you are targeting your customers based on the websites they are looking at, predefined keywords or email addresses that you already have, display ad targeting is your best choice. You will want to show your ads to the right people at the right time. It is for this reason that we created this set of articles to go through targeting your audiences on display networks.

“Instead of one way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.” — David Meerman Scott (Marketing and Sales Strategist, and bestselling author of 10 books including “The New Rules of Marketing & PR”) @dmscott

In this article I will cover:

#1 What Is Targeting Audiences On Display Networks?

#2 Why Should I Care About Targeting Audiences On Display Networks?

#3 How Can Targeting Audiences On Display Networks Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?

#4 What Should I Watch Out For When Targeting Audiences On Display Networks?

Let’s dive in…
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#1 What Is Targeting Audiences On Display Networks?

Some marketers believe that targeted display advertising is something that only makes sense for enterprises, and that small- and medium-sized businesses wouldn’t benefit from this method of marketing. However, the reality is that with today’s display advertising platforms, businesses of any size can utilize these types of ads.

It is a common misconception that display advertising is not appropriate for smaller businesses because it does not perform on a smaller budget. According to Trada’s research, when display ads motivate users to act immediately, it is just as likely to take the form of a search as an ad click. This shows that just because users are not clicking on the display ad does not necessarily mean that the ad is not directing users to your brand.

With data-driven targeting and retargeting abilities, display ads have become more effective and accurate in helping businesses of all sizes reach their target market. New real-time bidding technology has also made the ad buying process easier for smaller and less experienced ad buyers. In combination with search engine marketing, targeted display advertising can help you boost business by driving conversions.

Types of Display Ad Targeting

Once you are ready to jump into the world of targeted display advertising, you need to decide which type of targeting will best help you reach your target customers. Targeting typically falls into two categories:

Inventory Targeting — This is when you place your ads on certain types of sites. This can include sites based on content (types of content your target market is interested in) or demographic (demographic groups that closely match your target audience).
User Targeting — These types of targeting help you reach specific users, including behavioral (reach customers with specific online interests and actions) and geographic (reaching customers in specific locations).

Custom Audience Targeting — This type of targeting includes targeting a customer audience list that you create with all your customers emails in it.

#2 Why Should I Care About Targeting Audiences On Display Networks?

Marketers today face many challenges, no matter their industry. With competition coming from all angles and unshakable consumer “ad blindness,” brands must find ways to reach niche audiences with the right messaging at the right time. How can you make successful audience targeting a reality?

Audience targeting is synonymous with online advertising today. If you aren’t sending your message to a specific audience, you are “spraying and praying” — a technique that works well if you have an unlimited budget and no one to answer to for campaign performance.

Here are five steps for successful audience targeting, enabling you to pair audiences with the right messaging to communicate in more personal and meaningful ways, ultimately allowing you to reach your business goals.

Pixel Your Campaigns

Before you can start targeting your ads, you need to place a pixel on your properties (including your website and campaigns) to gather data about the audience. Pixels are small blocks of code on a webpage that allow websites to read and place cookies, which then passes anonymous information back to you about the person’s behaviors online, including what pages they viewed.

For digital marketers who have used Google Analytics, this process should be fairly straightforward. Google Analytics uses pixels to track the path to conversion of your audience.

Identify Your Clickers Or Converters

Pixeling your campaigns enables you to build an audience of “clickers” or “converters” — highly engaged audience members who are more likely to become your customers.

Once the audience is built inside your software and you have allowed a few weeks for data collection, to learn more you should dive into the analytics or audience profile about this valuable audience.

Most marketers have a good idea about who their target audience is. But the insights gathered based on your customer’s online activity may tell another story. Until you get information on who your online audience really is, you may be targeting the wrong people. And that won’t get you anywhere.

Whatever insights you gain can be used for the next campaign. So instead of targeting soccer moms, try targeting a financial audience the next time around to see whether your click-through rate increases.

Personalize Your Messaging

In digital marketing, one size does not fit all. Not every customer responds to the same message. The goal of any campaign is to get the most bang for your buck, and send a message that resonates most effectively to your audience to drive sales or leads.

The insights gained from your audience can be used to customize your messaging for further enhanced engagement, or to find more of those people who may also become customers (known as “lookalikes”).

Identify Lookalikes

Once you have identified your ideal customer, you can purchase third-party data to reach more of your target audience that hasn’t already visited your site or interacted with your brand.

Lookalike audiences are new people who are likely to be interested in your product, because they are similar to your important customers. You can base your lookalike audience on a variety of sources, but the clickers and converters mentioned above would be a good place to start.

For brands that need to increase the size of their audience for a targeted campaign, lookalike modeling is used to create reach. It uses third-party data available from a data provider or a software providers to enrich your “seed” audience (i.e., the base, in this case your clickers or converters) so you can fulfill your campaigns.

By targeting people who “look” or “act” like your target audience, you can focus your ad spend on those most likely to engage with your products and services.

Retarget

Retargeting is the most basic use case of audience-based marketing: You target ads to users who have previously visited your website or have shown some interest in your product or service. Retargeting refers to targeting those people again, in the hope of bringing them back to your site.

Retargeting can be based on previous interactions, such as a product search or an ad click-through. If paired with cross-device technology, retargeting can also happen across screens, so you can reach your audience on mobile and desktop, for effective, continuous messaging. Cross-device targeting is very powerful, but it’s a little more advanced than traditional retargeting.

#3 How Can Targeting Audiences On Display Networks Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?

Display advertising can be implemented on Google Adwords or through platforms that have advertising access on the general web, such as AdRoll. Using these platforms you can create ads and target them to the users that will help your business the best.

In my article, “How To Target Your Display Ads For Success — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, I will discuss the Google Display Network and a platform called Adroll, to give you insights into each products ad targeting capabilities.

#4 What Should I Watch Out For When Targeting Audiences On Display Networks?

The Google Display Network “GDN” is the largest contextual advertising network available on the Internet. Consisting of millions of websites, advertisers can display their ads to a wide range of audiences using many targeting options. Although it can reportedly reach of 92% of all Internet users in the US, hesitation to use it is not uncommon. For example, when your target audience is browsing websites, they may not necessarily be in ‘shopping mode’, in comparison to when they are using Google Search. So, to get the most from your GDN budget, you need to be smart about who you are going to target and how.

It is for this reason that we created the article, “How To Target Your Display Ads For Success — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”, to help you with tips and best practices for targeting your ads on Display networks.

“Are you making excuses for not finding ways to get around your challenges?” — Aaron Ross ( Author of fromimpossible.com and predictablerevenue.com) @motoceo

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In my next article, “How To Target Your Display Ads For Success? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, I will cover Google Adwords Display and Adrollto give you the best overview of the platforms and their targeting options to help drive your campaigns to success.