Targeting is the selection of potential customers to whom the company wants to to sell a product or service.
Where to start and how to set up targeting correctly?
Usually, this process consists of three stages
Main targeting goals
The main tasks that targeting solves.
- Increase the number of sales. This is done by segmenting the target audience and working with those segments that have already shown interest in the product or service.
- Motivation for the target action. In addition to making a purchase, potential customers from the selected segment can take other targeted actions, such as participating in a promotion, leaving contacts, registering on the platform, or downloading an app.
- Increase brand awareness. With the help of advertising targeting, you can consolidate positive associations with the brand.
- Portrait of an ideal customer. Targeting allows you to get to know your customers better and create several portraits of them to better understand who needs your company’s product or service.
- Budget savings. Only those users who are interested in the product see ads, and the number of untargeted impressions is reduced with effective targeting.
- Increase the effectiveness of advertising. Taking into account the characteristics of the target audience, you can prepare individual offers and ensure a personalized approach.
Types of targeting
Behavioral targeting is a way to segment customers based on their online behavior:
- what pages are visited;
- what search queries they form;
- what links they follow;
- what purchases they make
Visitors with similar behavior are grouped into segments.
Socio-demographic targeting is the selection of visitors by gender, age, education, profession, and social status.
Knowing these details, you can group customers who have something in common, for example, the same gender, age group, etc., and show product ads only to them.
The goal of contextual targeting is to display ads on a relevant platform alongside relevant content. It is analyzed for the presence of the right topics, keywords, language, geographic location, etc.
For example, a person reading an article with a pie recipe is likely to be interested in an ad for a slow cooker.
Geo-targeting allows you to specify one or more geographic locations where you want to show ads.
If you show ads outside of the required area or several areas, you can waste your budget and not get any return.
This means that ads will be displayed only during certain time periods, for example, only in the morning or afternoon, but not on weekends or holidays.
For example: a new product promotion should be announced between 4:00 and 8:00 p.m., when a person is driving home from work and thinking about what to cook for dinner. There is no point in showing them an ad at 7:00 if they are still sleeping at that time.
The idea of retargeting is to show ads to users who have already visited the company’s website but never made a purchase. Its purpose is to remind people of a product they are already familiar with and have shown interest in.
Due to the fact that a person is already familiar with the product, investments in retargeting often have a higher return on investment.
