According to TheTradeDesk, there are roughly 10 million ads every single second coming across the entire internet. Yes, read that again – 10 million ads every single second! It’s the video ad, the native ad at the bottom of the page, the audio ad on Spotify or Pandora – every ad that touches the internet.
So how do you decide – out of all of the 10 million ads that are shown every single second – which users you want to target? If you have a $100,000 monthly budget to spend, you will still get nowhere near the 10 million ads that are served every second, so you need to decide which valuable users and user profiles you want to target.
In the past, media buying targeting was something marketers had to guess (yes, basically throwing a dart at a board and targeting whatever the dart hit).
Measurement was eerily simple –
- Companies would measure if they were hitting their target market by calling people and asking them what they watched on TV last night.
- Users would drive past a billboard and marketers would assume *based on the number of cars that went by* that their advertising worked.
- Marketers would purchase ads in newspapers and/or magazines that their demographic was probably reading and assume 200,000 people saw their ad.
Fortunately, in 2021 – marketing has become a lot more sophisticated. The targeting abilities that are available are literally endless and the tracking is better than ever.
In the past, marketers weren’t thinking in terms of inclusion and exclusion audiences.
In 2021, marketers are thinking about which audiences they want to include in their targeting methods and which audiences they want to exclude from their targeting methods to be most efficient with their ad spend.
Think of it this way –
- Do you want to target everyone in the entire United States, or just users visiting pet stores or pizza places?
- Do you want to target everyone in a certain state, or just users that love skiing?
Advertisers need to do a deep dive into where their demographic is hanging out and what user behaviors their demographic is exhibiting.
At a bare minimum, they need to define their demographic. This is a tougher question than most marketers think. It takes hours of data mining to figure out – “who is my customer?” but it’s so worth it from an ad spend perspective. Maybe through the process of analyzing data – you will find that your target audience isn’t who you thought they were?
At Above the Fold, we recommend defining your personas, audiences and demographics as a starting place before running programmatic ads for prospecting purposes.
If you don’t start there, you will likely be wasting a lot of advertising dollars on clients that literally aren’t in the market for your product. One caveat to that is running lookalike audiences based off of the users that are converting on or visiting your website. This will help you target users who you know are in-market for your product while driving new users to your site to fill the conversion funnel.