Line It Up: Use Display and Native AD Targeting Tactics to Hit Your Business Goals

With new technology and newer targeting options, it’s easier to align your business goals with specific targeting tactics. Jonathan Lim, from Microsoft Advertising, talks through how native ad targeting tactics can help you hit your business goals.

Lately, it seems like paid search is the ad channel getting the most advantage from artificial intelligence. We’ve all been wondering when display and native ads would get to tap into some of that AI magic. Well, how’s now? Does now work for you?

In the last several months, display and native network platforms started making big moves, with technology finally catching up to the big ideas driving them. The coolest thing? With new technology and newer targeting options, it’s easier to align your business goals with specific targeting tactics. It’s a remarkable moment when the business goals discussed in the board room can more easily be supported by the daily doers at the ad targeting level.

Also Read: 5 Secrets to Winning Native Advertising

What’s this mean?

Brands have different goals for different products at different times. For example, an outdoor equipment manufacturer needs to build awareness of their new plastic-free collection of hiking gear, which nobody knows exists. They also need to sell hard the tents and sleeping bags that hold up the spring season and build more sales from existing customers, such as the young family who bought a jogging stroller.

Hitting all of these goals with display or native ads was previously a bit of a gamble. There just weren’t enough touchpoints with customers to get good data. With more data being collected and AI being used to process that data, there are more opportunities to match your ads to the audience. Now it’s possible with platforms like the Microsoft Audience Network, which combines signals from the Microsoft Graph, including search history, browsing history, and LinkedIn activity. Native ads are served based on these multiple signals. Laser-sharp AI targeting, meet display and native.

Not only can display and native serve these business goals, they can also drive search campaign performance as well. For example, our analytics team saw an average 37% lift in searches and 47% lift in clicks after users saw an MSAN native ad.ⁱ So running display and native ads in conjunction with search ads can help amplify your campaigns performance.

Let’s talk through three of the most common business goals and what ad targeting strategies and products can help meet those goals.

Business Goal: Building Awareness
 

With awareness campaigns, you’re working to find new customers or increase consumer familiarity with your brand, message, and your services or products. These people may not be ready to buy, but what happens when this person is ready? If your ads we’re showing up to them, the seeds were being planted and if you had effective awareness campaigns, hopefully, you’ll be top-of-mind to them.

How to Target for Awareness Campaigns
 

Imagine targeting with traditional television. The demographics are broad. The net you cast is wide. This is the same way you should think of targeting for building awareness. Using our example of the outdoor equipment manufacturer, plastic-free hiking gear could appeal to the people who never hike but like to wear the gear so their friends will think they’re hikers, and also to people who live on the hiking trail. That’s a massive audience. You want to stay wide with your targeting settings, using general profile settings for gender and age.

Depending on the platform you’re running ads on, you can stay broad but add in a level of granularity to ensure you’re only reaching new customers by adding in exclusions for known customers.

How to Measure Success
 

Engagement metrics are going to tell you if your broad awareness campaign is resonating with your target. Look at impressions against click-thru-rate (CTR). If your CTR is super low, maybe you’re a little too broad, and a refinement by income or geography will dial it in. If your CTR is strong, consider broadening your targeting even more to get in front of more people.

Business Goal: Driving Conversions
 

This is the business goal everyone talks about because this is what puts money in the bank. A conversion is an undeniable measurement of success. In our example, selling those tents and sleeping bags is a seasonal must. We know spring is high season, and we know the sales number we need to hit. The rest is just fine-tuning to hit those goals.

How to Target for Conversions
 

There are many great audience targeting strategies to help drive conversions. There are three that are top-of-mind for me that can help: In-market audiences, remarketing, and feed-based targeting. 

In-market audience targeting

A person who is in the market to buy a product (they’ve been searching the right keywords; they’ve read some product review sites) is considered an in-market target. Combining search history, browsing activity, and LinkedIn activity creates a sharp target. These curated lists of people are already identified as ready to make a purchase in a particular category, thus great for when your goal is conversions.

Remarketing

Remarketing says hello again to people who have visited your website, once they’re out in the wilds of the Internet. A broader remarketing campaign, say to those that have visited a specific product page, can be helpful driving to conversions.

Also Read: To Bid or Not to Bid? That Is the Question for DSPs

Feed-based targeting

For retail customers, feed-based targeting is a unique opportunity to help users convert. Using Product Audiences, it allows advertisers to remarket to customers using specific products they have viewed or added to their cart. This can be fine-tuned by SKU and Product ID, so there’s not a mismatch for the person receiving the ad.

How to Measure Success
 

Conversions, conversions, conversions. If your goal is to drive conversions/to put money in the bank, then measuring conversions is the most direct way to know if you’re hitting that goal. But also keep an eye on Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

Business Goal: Building Loyalty
 

You’ve got a customer. Great! Now what? Keep talking to them. But intelligently. By continuing to show up for your customer with ideas and offers that might appeal, you’re building loyalty. Your customer bought the tent and a sleeping bag – might they also need a handheld GPS? Loyalty in the digital age is fading, so continuing to provide users with targeted, personalized messages will help you stay at the top of their list.

Also Read: 5 AdTech Trends to Pay Attention to – Now, Not Later

How to Target for Loyalty

Once you have the customer, targeting options can get even more specific and helpful – for the advertiser and the customer as well.

• Product audience targeting is a Shopping Ad format that gets even more granular, because it lets the advertiser target from a SKU or Product ID level. The AI that powers product audience targeting automatically excludes converted Product IDs from continuing to be targeted. This is how you can sell the tent and sleeping bag, then not show ads for those products again. But you can show ads for a camp stove and hammock.

• Custom audiences relies on a first-party CRM list from an advertiser’s database, using existing knowledge about this person’s shopping behavior to make smarter decisions about engagements. This allows you to continue to reach these customers and craft ads targeted to them based on their previous behavior.

• Similar audiences, also sometimes known as lookalike, take your first-party CRM list and finds curated users who have exhibited similar behaviors to those on your list. This allows you to help expand your reach and identify new consumers that you can potentially target as well.  

How to Measure Success
 

Once a user converts, it may be harder to drive conversions, so while conversions are important to track, keep that in mind when looking at your ROI goals. Measure conversions but keep a less strict ROI goal in mind.  

As display and native ad technology develops, it’s on us to make the most thoughtful use of it. How do new audience targeting tactics and products map to our goals? How can we use products powered by AI to continually evolve our strategy? The best  advertising strategies are those where the business goals are aligned with the targeting strategies and have clearly defined KPIs to measure their effectiveness.