Location, Demographic and Behavioral: Three Keys to Target with Programmatic Digital Advertising

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Within programmatic advertising, there are three main ways of targeting your ideal customer persona: Location, Demographic, and Behavioral. Each targeting method has unique benefits depending on your target audience and what the most effective way to reach them may be. 

THREE WAYS TO TARGET YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER WITH PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING

programmatic advertising targeting options for businesses

  1. Location 

One of the three main ways to target is by location. geo-fence targeting for local businesses and events

  • Targeting by location means that you are actually able to find where users are at from a location perspective. 
  • An example of this would be geofencing – you’ve probably heard that buzz-term in marketing many times. 
    • We are able to draw a line around a building or location and fence-in those users so that you’re only serving ads to customers who are within the geofenced line – we can even serve these ads to those users for up to 30 days after they’ve been to the location.
  • What’s unique and interesting about this is that sometimes in marketing – especially with tv, radio and podcasts – there isn’t really a way to target very finite audiences (especially considering the past of marketing). Now, we’re able to geofence those audiences and see where they are. 
  1. Demographic

Another way to target is by demographic. 

  • Targeting by demographic just stresses even more that a business should know what their customer persona is. 
  • Knowing your demographic means knowing things like the age, gender, income level, net worth etc. about who it is that you’re trying to target for your business. 
  • It no longer makes sense to be targeting every single user on a device across the United States, or even just in one given state – it’s a waste of time, a waste of ad dollars, and you’re not going to know if you’re targeting exactly who you need to be targeting.
  • Programmatic advertising wants to make sure that you’re only targeting your specific customer persona. 

demographic targeting options.    ad targeting by household income and net worth. home ownership and value targeting for real estate

  1. Behavioral 

The third and final way to target that we’ll be discussing is behavioral targeting.

  • Behavioral targeting is probably one of the better known of these three forms of targeting – given the fact that it’s one of the main targeting strategies used through Google. 
  • Programmatic has a specific distinction from Google in the sense that it isn’t a “walled-garden” with all of the targeting limitations/restrictions that Google has. 
  • On websites like Google and Facebook, there are sensitive categories that make it hard to target who you may want to be getting in front of. 
  • You can’t really target things like net worth very well on Facebook with the privacy updates that have been put in place on these sites – we don’t face those same issues with programmatic. 
  • Programmatic can actually get away with certain targeting that those other “walled-garden” websites can’t. 

Depending on your target audience and what the most effective way to get in front of them might be, programmatic wants to be there to help. By knowing who you need to be targeting and utilizing the strengths of programmatic advertising, your reach can be as effective as it is expansive.