Targeted advertising - what it is, goals and objectives and how it works

What is targeted advertising

For those who already know about the features of this tool, its effectiveness is obvious. Statistics show that targeted advertising is one of the best sales channels. The name of this marketing tool comes from the English term target, which translates as “goal”. This type of ad is precisely tuned to the advertiser’s audience, which ensures high results.

Many people confuse targeting with contextual advertising or attribute this tool exclusively to social media (VKontakte, Instagram, Facebook). Both opinions do not fully reflect the essence of the term. Contextual and targeted advertising are not the same thing. At the same time, the tool we are considering can be used not only on social networking sites. To more fully understand what targeted advertising is, you need to consider its operating principle.

Mechanism of operation

For the first time, targeted advertising appeared on social networks. It was these sites that began to use data from users’ personal profiles for accurate and quick searches. Later, new opportunities began to be used in Internet marketing. Browsers collect detailed information about users and, based on this data, search for the audience to whom the advertisement will be shown.

To use this tool competently, you need to understand the psychology of your target audience, the interests of consumers, and their socio-demographic parameters. To confirm this and understand how targeted advertising actually works, let's look at a simple example.

The owner of an online clothing store needs to attract customers to his site, where the sale of a collection of summer sundresses has begun. Users of social networks, of course, do not write in their profiles about whether they like a particular style or cut. However, after analyzing the characteristics of the target audience, we can come to the conclusion that people of a certain age, gender, with approximately identical preferences in music or entertainment, and dress accordingly. Using such data, the owner of an online store sets up his advertising campaign so that ads are not shown to all people, but only to those who might find the offer truly interesting.

The mechanism of operation is simple. You study your target audience, set up the conditions for selecting users, create an ad, which is then reviewed by the administration of the advertising platform. After moderation, it is posted and shown exclusively to those users who meet the specified settings.

Difference from contextual advertising

Targeted ads are shown regardless of whether a potential buyer is looking for products or services in your category right now. Contextual advertising appears only based on requests made by the user at the current moment. This is the main difference between these two tools.

At the same time, contextual and targeted advertising ensures that it is shown only to those users who meet pre-configured selection criteria.

Principle of operation

The technology of targeted advertising is based on the principle of obtaining the most complete information about the user. Next, the system processes the data array, segmenting visitors into categories in accordance with the metrics. In social networks, this principle is implemented as simply as possible, since when registering, users voluntarily enter personal data into the fields of the questionnaire.

For example, VKontakte offers to fill out the following fields: gender, age, birthday, favorite movies, marital status, interests and others. All information is then used in targeted advertising and more.

Ads after moderation are shown to the target audience, according to the campaign settings.

Channels and types of targeted advertising

Social media is not the only platform for posting ads. The same opportunities are offered by online media and search engines.

Here's what targeted advertising looks like on Facebook:

This is how it is presented on the information portal:

This is what targeted advertising looks like in a search engine:

The same kind of advertisements can be placed in mail services and other popular resources:

The following types of modern targeted advertising are distinguished.

1. Local.
2. Socio-demographic.
3. Behavioral.
4. Temporary.
5. By interest.
6. By the number of requests.

They all differ in their set of criteria for ranking the target audience. So, with local targeting, the exact location of the client is important. For example, it should be no further than a few kilometers from the office selling goods and services. Socio-demographic targeting will take into account gender, age, commitment to a certain professional environment, income level, and region of residence.

Some sites offer to use different types of targeting at the same time. This makes the entire campaign more effective. When setting up targeted advertising, it is important to take into account not only its type, but also the features of the placement site. Thus, VK is considered a suitable resource for promoting inexpensive consumer goods. Facebook is visited by a larger number of executives and business owners, but here users have the opportunity to hide ads that are not interesting to them, which means that aggressive promotion will not be possible.

Choosing the most effective type of targeted advertising

Among the listed types of targeting, is there the most effective one? Is there a type of targeted advertising that would cover the greatest number of your needs? We think you already know the answer. It is necessary to use all methods in combination. To explain how this works, let's give an example.

Imagine a young man collecting Batman action figures. He saw targeted advertising in a profile group on a social network and went to a website selling such figurines. I looked through the pages, but didn’t buy anything. However, his data remained with the seller.

After some time, when there are a few days left before the collector’s birthday, he will again see an advertisement that will be directed to a store he already knows. Only this time it didn’t happen by accident, but thanks to the retargeting function - the ability to reach those who were already on the site.

The young man looked at the online store catalog and again prepared to leave without making a purchase. Only right before closing the page he was shown a banner with a special offer. Moreover, they offered a discount on the figurine that he had been looking at the longest, and in return they only asked him to leave an email address. The collector gives up and makes a purchase.

Obviously, for success, one type of targeted advertising is not enough. In the example above, we used both behavioral and interest targeting. If you show your imagination, the story of the interaction between the store and this young man can be continued for a long time. They will send him letters, offer promotional codes in exchange for reviews, and so on.

A competent approach to setting up targeted advertising. We hit the target without draining your budget!

Order promotion on social networks

Benefits of targeted advertising

Like any marketing tool we consider, it has its pros and cons. The advantages of targeted advertising are as follows.

1. Reach only representatives of the target audience.
2. Ad personalization.
3. Convenient and fast optimization.

In addition, targeted advertising offers the opportunity to promote your products and services without a website or a well-developed official community on social media.

Reaching only representatives of the target audience

When using targeted advertising, you don't have to pay to show ads to people who will never become your customers. For example, if you sell sunglasses in Moscow, there is no point in advertising to all VK or Facebook members at once. After all, those who permanently reside in other cities of the country will also see it. When placing targeted ads, you yourself choose the set of criteria by which users will be selected.

Ad Personalization

By knowing the interests and preferences of your target audience, you can make your ads less generic. For example, when advertising an expensive watch from a designer collection, you can mention in the text that it would be an excellent gift for businessmen. The closer your advertising is to the interests of users, the greater the likelihood that the targeted action will be taken.

Convenient and fast optimization

It’s easy to set up performance analyzers for targeted advertising. You can use Call Tracking Mango Office, Google Analytics or Yandex.Metrica counters. From simple and informative reports you will understand how many customers bring a specific ad and what the cost of clicking on it is. By comparing the costs with the income received from this client, you can understand whether the chosen promotion strategy and communication channel are effective. This will also allow you to promptly abandon non-working solutions.

How to set up targeting?

To set up targeted advertising, use a simple five-step scheme:

1. Create a profile of your target user. Analyze the behavior of online visitors who were interested in similar products, identify their interests and preferences, find out which groups they belong to. The more data you collect, the more accurate your customer avatar will be.
2. Choose a themed image for your ad. Before using a picture, study the requirements of social networks for graphics.
3. Set up the characteristics and parameters of the target visitor - gender, social status, behavioral patterns, interests, geolocation, login device and others.
4. Come up with a catchy title and a vivid description, always with a call to action.
5. Select the payment method, the cost of the campaign: payment for impressions or for clicks. At the start, set the amount below the recommended by 15-20%.

Disadvantages of targeted advertising

The main disadvantages of this tool include the following parameters.

1. Moderation of advertisements by platforms.
2. The need for constant updating and customization for each platform.
3. Complex pricing.

Let's consider all these features of targeted advertising in more detail.

Moderation of ads by platforms

When creating targeted advertising, you need to take into account the requirements of a specific site. Otherwise, the generated ad will not pass verification and will be rejected.

Constant updating of advertising materials

The target audience may gradually lose interest in the creative being shown. This is noticeable in the decrease in CTR. Therefore, this indicator needs to be regularly monitored and timely updates of advertising materials. Please note that the campaign is configured separately for each site.

Complex pricing

It is influenced by your click-through rate, the level of competition in your niche, and how narrow the target audience is. When setting the price per click, you can be guided by the recommendations of the site, then your ad is guaranteed to be shown.

How to start?

After setting up the basic parameters, click create campaign and your ad will be sent for moderation. After the creative is approved, the advertisement will be shown to social network users in accordance with the target settings.

Ads may not pass moderation for the following reasons: erotic content, advertising of alcohol or tobacco, financial exchanges, capital letters in the text, personal data of users, contact information, advertising of brands and more.

So check your creatives in advance to ensure they comply with the rules for publishing ads in targeted advertising.

Types of targeting

We have already touched upon classification above. Let's take a closer look at each possible type of targeting.

Geographical

Used to advertise goods or services sold in a specific region. For example, if you operate only in St. Petersburg, then you should advertise exclusively for residents of this city. You can customize displays for a specific country, district, region, city, and even street.

Behavioral targeting

This type is one of the most popular today. The browser cache stores information about requests and actions. Based on it, advertising offers subsequently pop up on various pages.

Targeting by interests

This type of settings is often used for contextual advertising. The user's cookies are taken into account, on the basis of which information is collected about previously viewed content, search questions asked, and resources visited. In accordance with identified interests, targeted advertising is provided, which may not correspond to the theme of the placement site itself.

Time targeting

The advertiser can set individual parameters for the period for displaying their ads. This could only be during sales office opening hours, in the morning on weekdays when users better perceive business information, or, conversely, in the evening on weekends. The choice of period depends on the specifics of the advertised goods and services. For greater efficiency, it is recommended to combine with other types of settings (by region, by interests, and so on).

Socio-demographic targeting

This type of settings takes into account gender, age, income level, profession and other important characteristics. This targeting allows you to seriously narrow the circle of the target audience to whom the ad will be shown.

What happens

You can select several settings in one advertising campaign. Take this risk only if you know your target audience thoroughly. Otherwise, the money will be wasted. And now we will deal with the main types of targeting on the Internet.

• Geographical

Recently, my friend, an SMM specialist, began advertising a dental clinic. They work exclusively in Nizhny Novgorod, so it would be stupid to create creativity for the whole of Russia. This is geographic targeting.

Geotargeting is chosen when you need people from a specific location.

How it works? The user's IP address location data is stored in the browser cache. When he visits a website or social network with a target, the information is transferred there.

An advertiser who has set up geographic targeting throughout Russia may lose money. This is necessary if you work throughout the country: have branches, deliver, or sell online courses.

How to setup. In the advertising account, we put a pin where we want to display creatives.

• By interest

Everyone likes something. Some people love to travel, some love to read, and others love to collect bottle caps. This can be used to identify potential clients.

Who should I sell air tickets and tours to? That's right, for those whose interests include: foreign languages, travel, culture, history.

On social networks and YAN, you can select displays based on specific hobbies. There is no need to use parsers to collect contacts.

• Temporal

You can configure your ad to display by hour, day of the week, holiday, or season.

For breakfast I want something healthy: porridge, muesli, eggs. For lunch you dream of something heartier: meat, seafood. For dinner, sushi, wine, and chicken are preferred. When a cafe changes its advertising depending on the time of day, it earns several times more. This is what time targeting is all about.

This is what setting up a time target looks like in the Yandex Advertising Network.

But targeting by time is not always profitable. Agencies and online stores lose customers if they choose a specific time. On weekdays, people more often order goods in the evening after work. If you cannot accept requests 24 hours a day, offer to leave messages or request a call back.

• Behavioral

We recognize the user’s interests by his behavior and display suitable ads. We take data from the history of requests and website visits, which is stored in cookies. We also get help from counters like Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics.

Behavioral targeting is needed when the target audience is difficult to group by interests and other characteristics. For example, laptops. They are needed for work, study, and play. It’s easier to identify those who are already interested.

Behavioral advertising can be placed even on non-thematic sites. The user is interested in what you show him. And they are more likely to pay attention and click.

• Socio-demographic

Gender, age, marital status, salary, position. We collect information from social network profiles, caches (tracking of pages visited), questionnaires and online surveys.

Knowing demographic characteristics will help hook the client and bring them to the target action.

No magic. Let's say we are selling a recruitment course. Our potential clients are directors, business owners, middle managers. Then we make sure that the advertisement is seen by those who have a suitable position listed in their job column.

See how advertisements change depending on the age of children. Although the topic is the same - selling real estate.

You can also play with age. Start with a headline like “20 years is a time to enjoy life.” The conversion will be higher. A nice bonus is that we also know about birthdays and take advantage of it. We send gifts and make congratulatory mailings. We establish a relationship with the client as with a close friend. He trusts and chooses us.

• Thematic

Advertising is displayed on sites that are interesting to the target audience and has something in common with your product/service. If you choose the right platform, you can count on good conversion.

Thematic targeting is suitable for selling to a narrow target audience. Place an advertisement for the new iPhone on a youth website, and cooking classes on a women’s website. You will get full coverage because visitors are already connected to the product.

The topic is specified by the site owner and checked by the moderators of the advertising platform.

How to choose the right type of targeting

The tools used for targeted advertising alone will not help ensure a constant influx of customers and commercial success. They should be used in conjunction with other solutions that align with your business's marketing strategy.

Before turning to this type of communication, you need to understand why targeted advertising was needed. It can solve the following problems.

1. Quickly informing potential customers about the properties of a product or service.
2. Promotion of the product among a narrow group of target audience.
3. Motivation for an immediate purchase or other targeted action.

Targeting works well when it is necessary to sell inexpensive goods, when the buyer can make a decision quickly, without a thorough analysis of competitors.

To ensure high efficiency of marketing communications, targeted advertising should be used in conjunction with SEO optimization, improving the usability of the site and landing page. Along the way, you can use retargeting to return those who have already been to your resource but did not make a purchase.

The choice of the best type of targeted advertising should be made based on practical experience. Split testing and analytics of the effectiveness of the involved communication channels will help with this.

How to evaluate effectiveness

The purpose is judged by its effectiveness. Didn't get what you wanted? We need to work on the mistakes. You can see what indicators to evaluate effectiveness in the target list:

1. Number of clicks. When we want to inform about an event or promotion, transitions are more important to us.
2. Conversion. The attitude of people who performed the target action towards transitions. Let’s say 100 people visited the site, and 5 bought. Let’s calculate: 5/100*100%=5%.
3. Buyer's cost. If the profit per client is lower than advertising, then the latter works at a loss for you.
4. Activity. Has there been an increase in likes, reposts, comments?
5. Number of new subscribers.

Most ad networks show these metrics themselves.

Secrets of using targeted advertising

For this tool to truly benefit your business, work with it when the company’s website and communities are fully optimized. Then, when arriving at a web resource from targeted advertising, the user will take targeted actions rather than wander around looking for the necessary information.

The tool we are considering is well suited for creating contextual advertising. It brings no less benefit when promoting goods worth up to 2 thousand rubles. In this case, the buyer will not need to carefully study reviews and competitors' offers to make a decision.

A/B testing should be carried out for targeted advertising. It will help identify workable solutions.

Don’t forget about good visualization of targeted advertising. Pictures should be large, clear, and headlines should be of interest. For text it is better to use familiar fonts.

How to improve your targeting efficiency

Each advertising campaign will need to be analyzed and understood which advertising spends less money and brings better results. This will help allocate resources more profitably.

To analyze advertising, we will need the Pepper.Panel browser extension. But the first ad can be checked without the extension.

See statistics, improve your ad, try again

The entire analysis is based on studying several parameters: how much we spent and how many targeted actions we received. In our case, the target action is the purchase of hamsters through the VKontakte group.

After analyzing your ads, you can begin to improve the quality of your original audience segments or the quality of your ads.

Analysis of competitors' advertising strategy . Let's say your competitors' advertising is working well. If our competitors are actively using Target, this is a reason to study and apply their best developments. To learn how to do this, watch the video from our colleagues Pepper Ninja.

Retargeting

This is a separate type of advertising. Those clients who already know about the promoted offer, product, or service come into view. If a user, for example, was on the site, studied the models presented, but did not place an order, an advertisement with the viewed product will pop up on another resource. This will serve as a reminder and motivation to return to the pages of your site.

Retargeting is usually implemented in the format of banner ads. You can set it up on social networks or through MyTarget. To operate the mechanism, special codes are used that are integrated into the site. They are remembered by the user’s browser and subsequently serve as the basis for displaying ads.

What does retargeting mean?

Retargeting is showing ads to those who were on your website but did not buy. In simple words, the user visited your site, did something there (looked at pages, products, wrote), and after some time you remind him of yourself on other sites using advertising.

To collect contacts of site visitors, you need to enable the “Pixel” tool on VKontakte or Facebook. Focus on where you are going to advertise. When you create an audience for a creative in the site traffic settings, select everyone who visited.

Rework your ad and make it more attractive. Think about what might turn a potential client off.

How retargeting works:

1. A special code is added to the site that reacts to certain pages being viewed.
2. Data that a person visited the landing page is recorded in the browser.
3. When a user visits a targeted site, the landing page visit data is read and relevant advertisements are shown to them.

VKontakte, Facebook, search engines: Yandex and Google have retargeting.

We track efficiency

Fine-tuning targeted advertising and finding solutions that are optimal for your niche can take a long time. In order to understand as early as possible which channels of communication with your target audience are profitable and how effective this or that ad is, you need to track their effectiveness. To do this, you can use one of three tools or a combination of them.

Yandex Metrica

In your personal account, you can set goals, find out the number of visitors to a particular page, and the source of traffic. The socio-demographic parameters of users are also displayed here. From Yandex Metrics you will find out how much time on average clients spend on a particular page and what actions they perform. If you set your goals correctly, you can find out the CTR and see the details of each transition for individual ads.

It is necessary to place the counter code throughout the site so that the system can collect statistics. This is true for Google Analytics as well.

Google Analytics

The functionality of this statistics collection system is somewhat broader than that of Yandex Metrics, but the settings are more complicated. Google Analytics provides the ability to conduct split testing and cohort analysis. At the same time, here you can also get all the detailed information about the cost of a lead and the number of clicks through targeted advertising.

The data obtained may differ slightly from what Yandex Metrica offers. This is due to the peculiarities of goal settings and different principles for collecting statistics.

Promo

Promos can be recognized by the caption “Advertising post.”
Promos work in the news feed, and sometimes can be shown among posts in a group. They look like regular posts from communities and friends. To distinguish a regular post from an advertisement, pay attention to the signature under the group name. If the caption says “promotional post,” it is without a doubt a promo.

See also: What is targeted advertising in VK, and how does it differ from other formats

Time targeting

Time targeting is most often used when setting up contextual advertising. For advertising to be more effective, you only need to specify “hot” hours in its settings. That is, when user activity is at its maximum level, as a rule, it is in the evening. Although it is best to set up time targeting, like any other, based on a detailed analysis of the advertising campaign.

Geographic targeting

Geotargeting is divided into: extended geographic and hyperlocal. These concepts differ from each other in the accuracy of location determination. If advanced allows you to highlight users within a certain country or locality, then hyperlocal targeting will bring customers who are located 500 meters from a given point on the map.

What is "targeting"

The definition, derived in encyclopedic language, looks like this: targeting is a special mechanism that allows you to select a target audience from the bulk of users. To paraphrase, targeting is an advertising tool that filters Internet users based on specified parameters.

The concept came into our speech from the English language, and was formed from the word “target”, that is, “goal”. The goal of any professional advertiser is to find the maximum number of consumers interested in purchasing in a short time. The advantage of targeted advertising is precisely that it allows you to do this with minimal effort in short periods of time.

Targeting allows you to filter out unnecessary users using special filters. Analyzing data about people, he takes into account several basic parameters that the advertiser sets. Based on the parameters, there are several types of targeting:

Formats

• Promoting an entry or post in a group or brand public
• Photo or video advertising in Stories
• A carousel of several photos or videos that help better show the product
• Placing advertisements on the side of a social network page (visible on desktop)
• Remarketing - when you set up advertising to those who have already visited your website, viewed pages with products or services

Example of a product carousel

Advantages

• The ability to quickly get traffic and leads to your product or service with the right sales funnel.
• The ability to run advertising on a specific segment of the target audience thanks to fine targeting settings.
• The ability to quickly launch advertising campaigns , test hypotheses and the effectiveness of different ads.
• The relative cheapness of the channel compared to other advertising channels (although it all depends on the budget and business area).