The Advantages of Programmatic Audience Targeting
Programmatic audience targeting – a man and a woman analysing on a whiteboard
Programmatic audience targeting helps businesses put the right content in front of the right people. In this blog post, we will discuss the different types of audience targeting available within programmatic advertising and how they work. Read on to learn more.
What is Programmatic Audience Targeting?
Programmatic audience targeting allows you to narrow the audience of relevant consumers to a specific group who are likely to want your product and service and direct your advertising to them. Audience targeting uses anonymised data based on online data sources and online behaviour, such as gender, income, age, interests, and more, to find customers with a high affinity or intent to purchase what your brand offers.
How Do You Target an Advertising Audience?
You can use programmatic to target a specific audience in different ways. Here at This Side Up, we do a lot of custom intent, custom affinity, in-market, and category-related audience research and building. We break down what these are and how they work below.
Custom Intent
Custom intent audiences are a Google feature that targets users based on previous online behaviour, providing an opportunity to connect with people searching for the product or service your business offers. The tool focuses on the users researching topics by website page visits and leveraging specific keywords. The customers targeted using this method tend to have a high intent towards the purchase of the product or service offering as they are in the actively researching phase of the consumer journey.
Custom Affinity
Custom affinity audience targeting is a little broader. It targets a particular group of users, for example, sports lovers or people interested in makeup, and then targets your product or service to this group. Affinity targeting gets your brand name out there, raises awareness of what you are selling, and creates brand recall.
In-Market
In-market audience targeting focuses on potential customers already researching and seeking information on your product or service. Google determines this audience based on clicks on related ads and the content of the pages they have recently been visiting. This method of targeting is excellent if you’re aiming for conversions.
Category Targeting
Category targeting is a broad way of targeting. It organises searches into a category, like arts & entertainment or travel. Within these categories, there are subsections to narrow them down and get things more specific. Category targeting is a broad way of defining your audience, which you can redefine to be more specific.
What are the Advantages?
Programmatic audience targeting offers many advantages, the obvious one being that your ads get put in front of the people that you want to see them. Programmatic audience targeting can be precise, helping you achieve your business goals. It is also a highly automated process. You won’t need to go out and collect data to identify your target audience; that data is already collected and organised, and there is no risk of it being skewed due to human error. You can also plug in your first-party data to build custom look-a-like audiences with similar online behaviours to your existing customer base.
Let’s explore a few more key benefits of programmatic audience targeting below.
Targeting
Programmatic advertising allows advertisers to target specific audiences with precision. Using data-driven insights, advertisers can identify the right people to show their ads to based on demographics, behaviour, interests, and more.
Efficiency
With programmatic advertising, buying and selling ad inventory is automated, which reduces the need for manual intervention. This results in more efficient ad buying and selling and faster ad delivery. In addition, using a Demand Side Platform (DSP) allows you to leverage programmatic audience targeting across a wide variety of inventory, including premium deals with top publishers, where your target audience is consuming information online. Leveraging these targeting opportunities means you can reduce media spend wastage by capturing your audience across multiple inventory sources and reducing the frequency of ad delivery regardless of where the user is consuming their online activity.
Cost-Effectiveness
Programmatic advertising can be more cost-effective than traditional advertising. It eliminates the need for direct media buys as the platform can find the audiences and deliver ads across a wide variety of online inventory sources.
Real-time Optimisation
Programmatic advertising allows advertisers to optimise their campaigns in real time based on performance metrics such as impressions, clicks, and consumer journey behaviour. This flexibility allows for swift adjustments to campaigns, which helps maximise their engagement and budget allocation effectiveness across the top-performing CTR media inventory options.
Data-driven Insights
Programmatic advertising gives advertisers data-driven insights to help them make better campaign decisions. Advertisers can use these insights to optimise campaigns and improve performance over time.
Scale
Programmatic advertising can reach a large audience across multiple channels and devices, including desktop, mobile, and connected TV. This enables advertisers to increase their reach and connect with more customers.
When done properly, programmatic advertising is a powerful way to deliver brand awareness across many relevant websites where your target audiences consume their online media.