Targeted advertising is advertising that is broadcast to a specific target audience based on publicly available information from user profiles. Quite often in practice, beginners confuse targeted advertising with contextual advertising in social networks. The difference lies in the way the target audience is segmented: the target uses user data, while the context uses semantic semantic keywords that are entered into the search bar.
Target in translation from English means – goal. Thus, targeted advertising is a targeted impact on the target audience, which is most likely to be interested in a product or service.
Who is targeted advertising for?
This type of advertising is suitable for almost any business. The most important thing is to correctly determine the target audience and choose the most optimal way to distribute and broadcast your advertising.
An important nuance is that the business you promote should not contradict the policy of the site and the laws of the state. It is more difficult and expensive for companies with expensive products and those who focus on b2b to effectively set up targeted advertising due to a narrow target audience.
How targeted advertising works
For the first time, targeted advertising appeared on social networks. It was these sites that began to use data from personal user profiles for accurate and fast searches. Later, new technologies and opportunities began to be applied in Internet marketing. Browsers collect detailed information about users and, based on this data, algorithms look for an audience to which ads will be shown.
In order to competently use this advertising tool, you need to understand the psychology of your target audience, the interests of consumers, their socio-demographic parameters.
The mechanism of the target is simple. You study your target audience, set up user selection conditions, create an ad, which is then checked by the administration of the advertising site. After moderation, it is published and shown only to those users who fit the specified settings.
Contextual advertising and targeted advertising: what is the difference
Main differences:
- Advertising placement: if there are two main services in contextual advertising – Yandex.Direct, including to the Yandex advertising network, and Google Ads, including to the Google Display Network. And at the disposal of targeting 4 social networks – VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Facebook, Instagram.
- Principles of target audience selection: contextual advertising is often targeted at potential customers with an already formed need. Targeted advertising is shown to users of social networks that match the description of the advertiser’s target audience.
- Tasks of advertising campaigns: in social networks, advertising is addressed to “cold” customers – those who have not yet shown interest in a product or service. Advertising campaigns are usually designed for reach, their cost is calculated by CPM – per thousand impressions. Context works with specific user queries in the search engine. The goal of the campaign is to get as many targeted clicks to the site as possible. The cost is calculated based on CPC – cost per click.
In addition, targeted advertising works with a limited number of users. For example, the number of users of the social network VKontakte, suitable for the targeting parameters “25-35 years old, from Moscow, married”, is approximately the same over a long period of time.
Targeted ads are shown regardless of whether a potential buyer is looking for products or services from your category right now. Contextual advertising appears only on the basis of requests made by the user at the moment. This is an important difference between the two tools.
At the same time, contextual and targeted advertising ensures that it will only be shown to users who meet predefined selection criteria.
How much does targeted advertising cost?
Advantages of a targeted advertising campaign
Targeted advertising has a ton of benefits that have made it such a huge hit. And here are the most important ones:
- Quick start. It takes an average of 1-2 days to simply create and set up targeted advertising.
- Ability to make changes. You can run a set of test ads, see which ones are doing well, and remove less successful ones from circulation. Based on the results obtained, you can adjust the target audience if you have not defined it accurately enough.
- Availability. Even someone growing up in a small business can afford to run targeting.
- measurable result. You can find out about the results of the advertising campaign in the statistics section. He will show you where, how and what kind of people come to you.
- Competition. You can formulate a profitable offer and set up a goal so that it is shown to the followers of your competitors.
- Personalization. You can start targeting a narrow audience, for example, representatives of a certain profession or residents of a certain area of your city.
- Hit the mark. If everything is set up correctly, then only those who are really interested in your product will see ads.
- Always works. And it doesn’t matter if you have a website or groups in social networks. Some platforms allow you to create a special form for collecting data without unnecessary transitions to other sites.
Cons of Targeting
- The need for constant audience engagement. For your ad to be as successful as possible, you need to monitor how your target audience reacts to it. This will help you make corrections right away if something goes wrong.
- Collection and processing of personal data of users. The battle for online privacy continues. This is why some users may hide personal information. But the effectiveness of targeted advertising only suffers from this – clicks are more expensive, and hits are getting fewer.
- Working with a cold audience. The warmer the customer, the more likely they are to buy your item. But the problem is that people don’t use social media to search for products and watch ads. Accordingly, the level of their motivation and interest in your product is initially not so high.
- Strict rules in advertising platforms. Some creative posts may not be moderated due to certain hard limits.
- Careful setting. If you do not pay enough attention to this process, your advertising simply will not hit the right target.
Target types
There are several basic types of targeting:
- Socio-demographic characteristics: the marketer determines the gender, age, income level and other characteristics of the target audience.
- Geographic location of the user: You can choose both broad and narrow targeting.
- Behavioral targeting: ads will be shown to those users whose actions match the specified ones. For example, you can show ads to travelers.
- Time targeting: A marketer can specify when ads will appear. For example, you can turn off ads from 20:00 to 10:00.
- Goal: what the company wants to get as a result of an advertising campaign. For example, you can increase website traffic, increase the reach of social media posts, increase conversions or increase the number of leads and sales.
Targeting options
Before you start advertising your product in the target, you need to carefully prepare. Namely, think over a promotion strategy, understand which platform has the most of your potential customers, study the rules for placing ads on it, and also draw up a portrait of the target audience.