Supercharge Paid Ads

Supercharge Your Paid Ads with 5 Proven Targeting Tactics

Looking to maximize your paid advertising budget? You may expect your biggest challenge to be financial: how can you outbid your competitors? You may not realize that an even more troublesome phenomenon is at play: ad blindness. Ad blindness is when viewers become so accustomed to certain ad formats and placements that they stop noticing them at all. Not great for ROI and certainly not the way to secure next quarter’s ad budget.

Don’t waste your hard-earned paid advertising budget on ads that no one will see. Leverage these 5 tried and true targeting tactics to create advertisements that are relevant and engaging to a viewer.

1. Demographic

Demographic targeting is usually the first step to audience segmentation. Audiences can be targeted based on the following characteristics: age, gender, race/nationality, income, parental status, marital status.

Pro Tip: While demographic targeting allows you to quickly identify and categorize certain self-identified segments, it’s important to recognize that 40% of searchers fall into the “unknown” category for both age and gender. Be careful not to over-segment or exclude those potential customers from your target audience.

[Blog] Conquest Advertising

2. Keyword

The main elements of keyword targeting are contextual and search retargeting. Contextual targeting allows you to place your ads on pages that feature related content. For example, you would serve an advertisement for Florida Tourism on a travel website.

Search Retargeting allows you to serve ads related to a viewer’s previous search history on websites that are not related to the original query. For example, someone who was looking for the best places to vacation, would receive an ad for Florida Tourism as they read news on the New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

[Blog] Product Tips: Ad Targeting Strategies

3. Location

At Cybba, we’re big fans of geo-focused advertising. We use both geotargeting and geofencing to serve ads specific to a consumer’s physical location.

Geotargeting is the addition of a geographic targeting layer to refine an advertising campaign. For example, we want to reach men, 25 to 40 years old, who are interested in online grocery delivery services, and live in Boston.

With Geofencing, location is used as the primary form of targeting. Geofencing uses beacons (as well as GPS, or RFID technologies) to trigger push messages and ads when, or after, a person has been to a specific location.

[Blog] Take Action With Geo-Focused Advertising

4. Behavioral

Behavioral targeting serves ads to consumers based on the actions they’ve already taken online. Armed with data about a consumer’s intent and interests, these ads yield higher click volume and viewability. Personalization is the key to combatting ad blindness. 

[Blog] Ask The Expert: What Is Dynamic Creative?

5. Custom Audiences

Custom audiences can be collected and created from website and CRM audiences. Website audiences are the most common form of retargeting. CRM audiences utilize email and home addresses to build lookalike and retargeting audiences.

This tactic drives higher ROAS because the targeting is based on data collected directly from a consumer. It also provides the foundation for the development of targeted ads to similar audiences.

For more on Paid Social read [Blog] What's the Best Platform for Social Media Advertising? and watch [Webinar Replay] 5 Powerful Audience Targeting Strategies.

Victoria Cohen
Victoria Cohen
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