Programmatic advertising has many different ways to reach your target customers such as audience/demographic targeting, contextual/keyword targeting, behavioural targeting, geotargeting and remarketing. The right targeting type for your campaign will be based on several factors like product, customer data, industry and ad purpose of the ads.

It’s not just about getting prime-time TV slots, which used to be very expensive and drew in unqualified viewers to conduct paid marketing campaigns. But now programmatic ads have changed the game, because now you can target your ideal buyers with just a few simple questions about them. These data point to which programmatic ad targeting campaigns will be most effective.

But how do you know what questions to ask, and even better, what they are?

How to Answer the Questions Rightly to Identify Which Ad Targeting Types Work Best?

If you want to fulfil the prerequisite of the right ad targeting type, here are 4 facts about your business.

The Product

What does your product do? And all you have to know is, what is your product about. You have to know What is it supposed to do? What a job does it do right?

A simple tip that all companies do is to run a SWOT on your product and business model. SWOT analysis will tell you what your product is good, bad, potential and threat.

The Customers

You have to know your customer inside and out beyond demographics if you want to target them.

A buyer persona is the place to start. You have to know simple things such as demographics and firmographics. And then you can start to narrow it down to their issues, solutions and needs.

The Industry

So, what rules the market? You’re not the only one on the market, unless you’re building a real time machine. You need to be ahead of the curve and discover your industry best practices, so don’t delay.

Understanding industry best practices is all about knowing which company is dominating, and which target market is being in a particular marketing mode.

The Purpose

So, what do you aim for with programmatic ads? Every programmatic ad campaign can have a different goal. The targeting type has the biggest impact on the final outcome of what you want your target to do.

Typical Programmatic Ads Goals: This is generally for sales, brand recognition, remarketing etc.

Once you know these 4 aspects of your business you can easily begin to figure out the media buying strategies and target types.

The 5 Programmatic Advertising Targeting Types to Understand.

Audience/Demographic Targeting

Here’s a simple line of difference between the majority of B2B and B2C products: it’s not general. B2B products are very specific solutions for very specific businesses. B2C goods, meanwhile, have a more general solution to serve a larger portion of the population.

For those B2C products, the audience/demographic targeting of programmatic advertising is amazing. You identify the segment of audience by getting demographic data about them. To be specific, you need to know there:

Gender

Age

Location

Income group

Occupation

Parental status

Interests

Some of these are unique to your product and you might even have to add a new one. You can target audience based on this demographic data.

Contextual/Keyword targeting

Keywords are the marketing nerve of the industry for us professionals. As marketing as it should be, the perfect center of gravity is the audience. But we don’t always have access to them, or data that gets us inside their heads. Fortunately, the keyword tells us pretty much everything about the intent of the audience.

Keywords may be different – commercial, informational, navigational, transactional etc. They are often a take-action type of thing and they’re telling you just what the audience is wanting to hear. From there you can steer that audience to a satisfying location that addresses their problem of search; as well as help determine the course for your customers.

If you go with keyword targeting, your ads will show to buyers with a better chance of conversion. Since your ads are relevant to them instead of based on some supposition, they will have more to click on.

Geotargeting

SEO & Advertising are a big part of Localization. These are the most searched queries, local searches like “Postal near me”. Geotargeting is all about reaching your local audience. By being local to your customers, a lot of the barriers to buy are taken away, such as distance and time.

Geotargeting ad serving: you must provide zip codes or general geo targeting filters. You can even mix geotargeting and keyword targeting using location-based navigational keywords.

Behavioral Targeting

Do you remember the commercials for those gym mats that you happened to look up in Google? That’s because of behavioural targeting. The majority of sites save cookie information that will be collected by advertising networks such as Google Ads.

Behavioral targeting is nothing more than taking user behavior and picking the right products that are suitable for them. Including user behaviors such as browsing on the same niche or product category again and again.

Behavioural targeting is one of a kind, and extremely powerful way to target your customers. Behavioural targeting instead of demographic targeting allows you to target the audience who’s interested in your product.

The first thing that most people mistake is behavioural targeting for the second.

Remarketing

Remarketing is not behavioral targeting, which is one thing but a different. Another method of programmatic targeting that is based on actions. But, unlike behavioural targeting, with remarketing you only target those that already visited your website or engaged with your digital content.

Remarketing is for remarketing that same user and converting it. Also, it can connect you with old users who are no longer on your site or using your product.

Optimize Your Ads with The Right Programmatic Targeting.

A programmatic ad targeting type is a must have if you want to get the best use out of your ad spend. Because if you know how to market only to people you absolutely need, then you don’t have to splash out more on non-action-ready people.

But these targeting types are less a set of absolutes than a roadmap. You’re likely to be a mix of all these strategies and that’s your type. It all depends on the factors that we covered above.