First things first, you can use audience targeting to show your ads to:

• Specific sets/groups of people, depending on their location
• Specific websites, depending on their specific interests
• Group of websites, depending on specific interests
• Specific sets/groups of people, depending on their interests

You Can Use Audience Targeting to Show Your Ads To: Key Aspects

Identifying your website’s visitor goes a long way in identifying their needs and getting business from them. In most cases, you get a single chance of targeting your visitor so it’s critical that you make that chance count. Once a customer leaves your website, he/she might never return. SO you must try to learn as much as possible about customers before they exit the site. This will help you give them exactly what they are looking for. 

It’s a well known fact that over 95% of website visitors leave without buying anything. To combat this dismal number, audience targeting is extremely crucial. Not only does audience targeting help you with sales conversion, it also helps you create and publish more customer specific ads and cut down on advertising cost.

What is Audience Targeting?

Audience targeting deals with filtering or segmenting the available audience to transform it into something which is as highly targeted as possible. By limiting who you display your advertisements to, you’ll be able to reduce your advertising expenditure by a large margin. Audience targeting also helps you achieve a great return on investment.

Every advertising platform allows you to select your audience. To do so, you can use a range of various filters. Some are better than others, but what really matters is that the size of the audience you’ll reach once your filters have been selected. So choose your advertising platform accordingly.

These are the most common types of audience targeting:

Target by Location

Over time location targeting has become more and more precise, targeting consistent with the country and by region and even by neighbourhood in some circumstances. It depends on which country you’re located and what are its privacy laws. Some countries don’t allow highly targeted geographical targeting (Germany for example) so you need to work accordingly.

The growing importance of mobile first advertising is indisputable. In 2016, searches made via mobile phones officially overtook the searches made via desktop. An example of this is when people within the proximity of a selected real-world store are often targeted with advertising for a purchase or a time limited discount offer in real-time.

Target by Demographics

Big data held by advertising platforms allow targeting with the help of many factors. Some of those are sex or age, education and even by income in some circumstances. It’s a fantastic method for eliminating a vast number of irrelevant people from your paid advertising. For instance, when you advertise a women-specific product for women specifically, you eliminate other people who would have no interest in buying women related products. These people might not find the women specific products interesting and advertising to them would be a waste of advertising money.

Target by Interest

This is another common method of targeting audiences for PPC campaigns using Google Adwords but also on Social media platforms. What was formerly called interest-based advertising by Google has been renamed to personalized advertising, following the trend of advertisers eager to be seen to profit users instead of annoying users. Across the industry, personalization is replacing interest based and topic-based terminology.

Targeting by interest is definitely the most powerful of all targeting techniques because it addresses the exact requirements and purpose of the customer. It provides the most accurate answer to the question, “what does the visitor want”.

Target by Behavior

Sales personnel are always taught to look out for purchasing signals, words said, or actions done unconsciously, that divulge user intention. This always helps them with closing the sale. Things aren’t that different online. Obviously, there are fewer “tells” on the web with no voice or facial expressions to analyse, but online there’s something even as powerful, – the tracking of actions.

The saying “actions speak louder than words” is even truer online than the real world.

By combining pieces of user data you’ll build an image that tells you who your customers are and what they need. It is carried out with the help of various types of data. For example: device used, videos watched, content read, or customer support questions asked (one of the most important buy signals).

First-party data is often used freely to focus on your existing traffic, which makes it especially valuable because it enables the refinement of targeting before paying for PPC advertising.

What we are effectively talking about here may be a whole area of selling which is dedicated to personalization of targeting (not to be confused with what Google now calls personalized advertising), referred to as conversion rate optimization (CRO) otherwise referred to as Conversion Marketing or CRO Marketing. CRO is predicated on first-party data (your analytics data), and subsequently, the creation of a customer journey map for all of your customer types to make personas and a conversion funnel. 

Target by On-Site Messaging or Re-messaging

This form of experience personalization has been entirely defined by the use of real time targeting technology and tools that enable On-Site Retargeting. This technology enables website owners to automatically trigger messages to visitors consistent with their actions onsite. The ultimate goal is to possess personalized messages that are triggered for each customer at every stage of the conversion funnel. These messages are designed for helping the customer move forward, towards subsequent stages of the conversion funnel.

The eventual goal is to get them to purchase the product and make them come back for subsequent purchases. Every message is optimized through A/B testing in-order-to generate the absolute best conversion rate. When Google Advertising or Social media advertising is employed to drive traffic, this type of targeting helps the visitors have a wonderfully personalized experience that really boosts conversion rates.