How To Target Your Display Ads For Success? — Part 2

Published in

Inside Revenue

10 min readNov 19, 2018

The Intermediate Guide

In Part 1 of this article series, I went over what targeting your display ads is and gave you five steps for successful audience targeting. This was to show you how audience targeting can help you in your business. If you missed this article you can click here to read “How To Target Your Display Ads For Success? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”.

In this article, I will cover Google Adwords Display advertising and Adroll (a platform you can use to advertise on the various Display Partner Networks) in order to give you the best overview of these platforms and show you all the targeting options they have available to you.

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

In this article we will cover:
#1 Google Adwords Display Advertising

#2 Adroll Display Targeting

Let’s get going…
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#1 Google Adwords Display Advertising

Adwords display ads appear on over two million websites and in over 650,000 apps, so your ad can show up wherever your audience is. The AdwordsDisplay options include the following ad types:

Text Ads
Like an ad on Google Search, display ads include a headline, two lines of text and a URL.
Google Mail Ads
Show custom ads in Gmail so people can save, forward and expand your ad in their inbox.
Banner Ads
With images or rich media, these ads let you include custom layouts, interactive elements, animations and more.
App Ads
Create a campaign targeting specific mobile app categories, or track the performance of the in-app ads you’re already running.

With millions of websites, news pages blogs, and Google websites like Gmailand YouTube out there, the Google Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users worldwide. With specialized options for targeting, keywords, demographics and remarketing, you can encourage customers to notice your brand, consider your offerings and take action.

The Display Network has traditionally been ahead of Search when it comes to targeting options, and that still holds true. Display has all the targeting options listed above, plus a few more. We’ll explain any option that wasn’t yet discussed, or has a special application when it comes to Display.

Inventory Targeting

Age
Gender
Household income — in USA, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand
Parental status — for your display ads, you can target “parents” or “no parents.” The ramifications when it comes to child-related products or services is obvious.
Type of device
Language
Location

User Targeting

In-market audiences: people likely to interested in buying what you have to offer.

Affinity audiences/custom affinity audiences: people likely to be interested in learning about what you have to offer.

Affinity audiences hit a higher part of the funnel than in-market audiences. Affinity audiences are groupings based on Google’s observations of people’s interests (websites they visit to read articles, for example). Just because you frequent gardening websites doesn’t mean you’re in the market for gardening tools, but it does mean you’ll probably be interested in at least hearing about the newest gadgets for your garden.

Custom affinity audience give you more control over the categories used to create the affinity audiences. Here are 3 strategies for using custom affinity audiences to get great campaign results.

Life events: people just before or after a major life event such as graduation, marriage or moving.

When are people most likely to be interested in professional help with a resume? If you’re about to graduate, that’s a prime time. How about a sofa? Maybe if you’re about to get married and furnish an apartment?

Whether you offer professional resume help, sofas or any other offering for which a life event is a likely motivator to buy, you can now reach those audiences on YouTube and Gmail. (Not the rest of the Display Network — yet.)

Remarketing audiences: people who have already visited/performed an action on your website.

It’s good to know that despite the “creepy remarketing” memes going around the internet, data proves that even display remarketing ads are more effective than standard display ads. Apparently creepiness is overrated.

Custom Audience Targeting

Customer match audiences: people who have done business with you in the past and whose email address you have.

On Display, customer match is only available for YouTube, Gmail and Shopping ads.

#2 Adroll Display Targeting

AdRoll was founded in 2007 on the principle that you could effectively advertise online, even without infinite resources and budget. Since then, they have made it easy to challenge established brands and grow your business online.

AdRoll is a growth platform. But what is a growth platform? It’s software that takes some of the best marketing tactics you know work — display ads, social ads, triggered emails — and syncs them together to drum up more revenue.

AdRoll allows you to create new audiences to target based on how visitors interact with your site. You can organize your website visitors based on either what their interest is or how high their intent to convert is.

Interests
Create an audience based on how much interest someone shows to send messages catered to the defined audience.

Intent
Create an audience based on a visitor’s level of intent to identify which visitors are most likely to convert.

Create An Audience

To add an audience to a new campaign, navigate to the Audience section of the page and either create a new audience or add an existing.

Define audiences based on:

URLs
A fixed page
An event
The number of pages viewed
The number of impressions served
CRM lists

URL-Based Audience
A URL-based audience organizes visitors based on pages or products they browse. URL-based audiences are the easiest to set up. Aside from placing your AdRoll Pixel, no further changes need to be made to your website to set up this audience type.

Create a URL-Based Audience

Log in to AdRoll and navigate to the Audience tab.
Click New Audience and make sure that the Audience Type is set to URL Visited.
You can create a New Audience if you want to define the audience by one URL, or create a New Composite Audience to use multiple URLs.

Special URL Characters
There are two special characters used in URL audiences: * and ?. These characters are called “wildcards” and are placeholder variables that represent either a single character or a string of characters.

The larger your audience, the more AdRoll can optimize within it. Unless you have thousands of visitors coming to your website every day, we don’t recommend using an individual URL to define your audience. Instead, use special characters to help you define more general URL-based rules.

Learn more about special characters.

URL Patterns
A URL pattern is a unique series of letters and characters that appears in the URLs of your site pages. Use your URL patterns when you’re setting up your URL-based audience.

Example
URL: www.adroll.com/category/section/page/

If you create a segment with the URL pattern */category/section/page/, your segment will capture any traffic to that specific page.
If you create a segment with the URL pattern: */category/*, your segment will capture any traffic to a page that contains the phrase “/category/”.

Fixed Audience
A Fixed audience is useful if your website’s URL structure does not allow for defining audiences based on specific URLs or URL patterns.

Use with:

iFrames
Pages whose URL does not contain unique identifiers
Certain container tags
Track conversions

Create a Fixed Audience

Navigate to your Audience tab.
Click New Audience and set Audience Type to URL Visited.
Fill in your Audience Name and click Copy ID to clipboard. This pulls a unique alphanumeric ID to be used as the URL rule placeholder.
Paste your ID into the URL field.
Complete the remaining fields and Save.

Prepare the Script
Below is the script that you’ll need to use to tie the pages you choose to your fixed audience. Update the audience pixel by replacing the segment_ID in quotes with the unique ID we generated for you.

Activate the Audience Pixel
Add the audience pixel to the HTML of your chosen page(s), right after your AdRoll Pixel but before the closing </body> tag.

Track Conversions with Fixed Audiences
If you want to use the audience pixel to fix your conversion page to your conversion audience, make sure you select This is a conversion audience

Event-Based Audience
Event-based audiences are based on click events rather than on pages. To create this audience type, you have to add a piece of code to the on-click attribute of your JavaScript button. This audience type is also useful for tracking events such as form submissions.

Use for:

JavaScript buttons
Tracking conversions that need to be completed on a separate website (common with event promotion)

Create an Event-Based Audience

Log in AdRoll.
Navigate to your Audience tab.
Click New Audience.
Under Audience Type, select URL Visited.
Type your Audience Name, then click copy ID to clipboard. This pulls a unique ID to be used as the URL rule placeholder for this audience.
In URL pattern field, type a plus (+) and then paste the copied ID.
Specify if this is a conversion audience.
Enter your desired Duration: the number of days that someone remains an active part of the audience.
Save.

Prepare the Script
Below is the script, called an event pixel, that you will need to tie to your event audience. Update the event pixel by replacing the example ID in quotes (“25c14f39”) with the unique ID we generated for you.

Activate the Event Pixel
The event pixel should be triggered through the onClick function of the button on the page(s) where the event occurs. As an option, many of our advertisers place the script in an external JavaScript file that gets called during the click event.

The best practice here will depend on existing website structure. Consult your technical team.

Counting All Clicks
Event-based audiences are triggered when a visitor clicks the button, regardless of whether the action successfully goes through. For example, when a user attempts to submit an incomplete form with required fields, they will count as a click even if the form returns an error.

Pages-Viewed Audience
This web-only audience type allows you to organize your audience based on a minimum number of pages they viewed at while on your website. While certainly not the only indicator of visitor intent, a good rule of thumb is that the more pages someone views, the more interested they are in what you have to offer.

Impression-Based audience
This web-only audience type allows you to organize your audience based on a minimum number of impressions served. Consider this if you’re a B2B business where sales cycles are typically extended over a longer period of time and you want to utilize sequential messaging.

To define an impression-based audience, set an impression threshold.

Use Cases

Sequential messaging: Change targeted and excluded audiences between campaigns. For example, show one message to visitors after they’ve been shown at least 15 impressions, and then target that segment in following campaigns.
Sequential and composite messaging: Use sequential messaging for different audiences. For example, define an audience by “at least 10 impressions,” along with “/orders.” Then, you can target people that have been to that URL and been shown at least 10 impressions.
Granular frequency caps: Exclude users after a certain number of impressions in campaigns.

CRM Audiences
CRM data onboarding allows you to leverage email lists in your campaigns. If you conduct part of your business off your website, want to re-engage old customers, have a seasonal offering, or need to build on your existing campaign audience, CRM is effective.

Create a CRM audience with your prepared .CSV email list

Navigate to your Audience tab.
Click New Audience.
Select CRM for Audience Type.
Upload your .CSV file and complete the remainder of the form.
Save.

Format your email list

Your CRM file needs to be formatted correctly for your list to match correctly.
File must be formatted as .CSV.
List must contain at least 100 unique user emails.
All emails must be listed in a single column. Do not list any information other than the emails you would like to match.
Remove any empty rows.
Maximum file size: 10MB.

Additional considerations

CRM audiences can’t be edited after they’re created. Total visitors reflects the number of emails in your list.
The cookie matching process can take up to a week. Take this into consideration when planning your CRM campaign.

“If we follow the same path everyone else follows, we’re going to be one of the pack and we’re not going to be different. The best reason for doing something is because it’s never been done before.” — Joanne Black ( Referral Selling authority) @ReferralSales

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In this article, I have shown you how you can target your display ads for your audiences. This was displayed through the insights given on Adwords and AdRoll. These strategies can help you to target your audiences on the general web and get your brand in front of your ideal audiences.

In my next article, “How To Target Your Display Ads For Success? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”, I will cover some of the tips and best practices for targeting on Display platforms.