What is Targeting in Digital Marketing?

A target is a goal or something you want to hit with accuracy and precision. In digital marketing, the target is the audience. Not a bland, faceless, anonymous audience but the right audiences for your products or services.

People’s digital footprint is rich in data – the places they visit (real and digital), the profiles they complete, the conversations they have, and the products and services they buy. Targeting ads do not focus on one individual but groups of individuals sharing the same characteristics or persona. Decades of learning how to collect and analyze data about people mean creating a specific target audience is straightforward. As is finding and targeting advertising to them. That is the point of ads targeting digital marketing – finding the people who are most likely to buy what you are selling.

A targeted ad is content that the owner pays to display to a specified type of person when they are online. There are two components to a targeted Ad – the audience and the content. The audience is the target and focus of the Ad campaign. Targeted advertising involves traits with a relevant value to the product or service promoted through the campaign. After defining the audience, the marketer creates the content most likely to appeal to the target audience using a mixture of images, text, and psychology. The shape of the material suits the digital landscape displaying the targeting ad to the audience. Targeting involves both broad and narrow groupings of people by their defining traits:

Tightly focused targeted adverts aim to maximize conversions and interest from a clearly defined subgroup of people. The platform hosting the Ad identifies targets from their activity online.

Targeted ads work because we finally have access to big data sets, and we study human psychology. Salespeople hone their approach to selling in person by becoming sensitive to how people respond to them. Marketing and selling is the way businesses thrive, so the psychology of the buyer is big business in the past and today.

Research shows that people are twice as likely to click on an ad targeting their behavior patterns. Psychographics have more influence than demographics when you have access to this information about people. Psychographics covers your beliefs, opinions, values, and motivations. If you care for the planet, you are more likely to respond to ads targeting you with an eco-friendly message. It’s more nuanced than that, but people react to ads that appeal to their self-image. People’s beliefs also influence what they buy and how much they are going to spend.

Targeting ads focus on the audience segment most likely to slide down the buying funnel and buy the advertised products or services.  The types of targeted adverts revolve around the audience and their interactions with the internet. The accuracy and quality of the targeting criteria depend on a mixture of audience research (analytics and some benchmarking with focus groups) and the web platform offering the ad space.

Behavioral targeting focuses on what the audience does, and it covers collecting information about:

• Web browsing – in detail: search queries, links, time on page.
• Past purchasing history – specific products and product types.
• Past interactions – ads and links you click through.
• Location tracking – your mobile can ping and send data.
• Visitor frequency and timing on websites.

Behavioral targeting ads can be:

• Onsite – products and promotions display while you are on a website. Typically, relevant to the content and the user.
• Network – information from a wide range of websites are tagged to specific devices/individuals and assigns used for targeting.

Behavioral targeting ads follow an identified target customer type across the internet and show them relevant ads on unrelated websites. Or when they are spending time on social media. For advertisers using behavioral targeting increases customer engagement and sales.  A person’s online behavior signals their future intent and where they are in the buying funnel. Sophisticated behavioral targeting ads pitch to customers who are on the point of making a purchase. Consumers get a more personalized experience – they get ads that might tempt them into buying, but only because they see products and services that suit their needs. Intelligent targeting also means that the ads are relevant in terms of timing as well as the content. Increasing sales is the pay-off for the advertiser, but the consumer also benefits. Behavioral ads typically generate more conversions and better return on the marketing budget than generic ones. Behavioral ads are useful for:

Content or contextual targeting places ads that are relevant to the content and the user by linking the two together. Someone who is reading a blog about horse riding or painting is probably interested in those activities. Content ads targeting those interests are more appealing than ads for a product like wine, for example. The context of the advert and the surrounding content with a consistent message feels more natural to the viewer. You can use a mixture of behavior and content to produce a combined targeted ad. The content targeted ad triggers with keywords and the site type. The owner of the site benefits from a share of the advertising revenue and doesn’t offend their users by showing inappropriate or irrelevant ads.

Search engine results pages provide valuable advertising space. The ads are targeting keywords or phrases that signal the user intent. The targeting ad the user sees is the result of a competitive bidding process.

Search engine targeting ads work for the advertiser because:

Think about how you interact with the digital world – continually moving between devices. You are the same person on each device and a member of overlapping target audiences. Cross-device targeting tracks the same audience across all devices and serves up the ad in the right format for the device.

There are two methods:

• Deterministic – track a unique individual by their identifiers.
• Probabilistic – infer that it is the same individual by how they behave.

Using cross-device targeting ads means focusing on providing a better customer experience to promote your brand identity and story regardless of how they access your business through your marketing.

Television advertising lags the targeting techniques available to data-rich digital platforms, but that is changing.  There are two approaches:

• Data-driven – there is demographic data, viewer figures that let you segment the audience likely to be viewing a program network and at which time.
• Addressable – the targeted ad is specific to the household watching – live or catch-up. You buy your preferred audience instead of the program link.

Television advertising with a targeted audience is a better marketing tool than the old system of buying space between the programs and hoping for the best.

You can choose to outbid your competitors to place your ads in front of people who are on your RLSA. It makes sense to limit this to website visitors in the past month.  If they are in the market to buy what you are offering, it only takes a little nudge from an ad to be successful in gaining the sale. Alternatively, you could expand your keyword list to target people who have bought from you in the past. Typically you narrow down the keywords to avoid displaying to people with minimal intent. A retargeted audience is more likely to be open to your message – their intent rating is above the general audience for these keywords for your business.

The amount of data collected on people engaging with the internet makes possible targeting on an unprecedented scale for marketing purposes – you get a glimpse inside people’s heads. The dark side of this targeting is the unease many people feel about potential violations of their privacy.

Responsible ad agencies take time and care to ensure that the target audience is not subject to breaches of their privacy and security through targeted ad campaigns.  Brands and ad agencies can reassure potential customers and targeted audiences by:

Responsible ad agencies act ahead of legislation and treat user’s digital data collected for marketing purposes with the same level of confidentiality and security with the standard provided by bankers, lawyers, and doctors.

Targeted ads that result in people feeling inappropriately targeted by sensitive information (disability or sexual orientation, for example) or creepily stalked by underhand privacy violations are not good business. The idea behind targeted ad marketing is to engage people with your brand and not offend and discourage them. Targeted ads are useful but need to fall on the right side of acceptable practice.

Targeted ad campaigns aim to inform, educate, and suggest relevant products and services benefiting the customer and building up a mutually beneficial relationship. Our best practice involves being trustworthy, honest, and sensitive to user’s privacy concerns.