Targeting is the practice of specifying a valuable audience that you want to serve ads to and applying a commercially attractive approach to that audience. In other words, targeting involves knowing who you are focused on and how best to appeal to them in order to provide a personalized experience.
Our platform enables you to implement a variety of targeting approaches, including A/B testing and running multiple complementary campaigns. Our reporting and analytics tools provide insights that inform your strategic changes as a campaign matures. These things help ensure that your spend goes where it is most effective.
Targeting features
iPromote provides several targeting modules on Step 3 - Targeting of its campaign building journey. The modules define your campaign target and our serving engine uses real-time and historical data to match ads with suitable viewers.
In addition to the tools provided on the Step 3 - Targeting page, iPromote includes built-in targeting features that work behind the scenes to ensure an advertiser's ads reach the right audience.
Manual features
Some of our manual targeting features include the following:
- Demographic targeting: Specify the age and/or gender of the audience you want to target.
- Geographic targeting: Specify the area in which you want ads to appear. More than one location can be specified.
- Interest targeting: Specify one or more audience interest categories by which to display ads.
- Media targeting: Specify the kinds of media you want ads to display on. Options include web, mobile, social, native, video, and search.
- Scheduling: Use the Ad Scheduling module to target an audience based on day of the week, holiday, and time of day.
Other manual settings are available, depending on your organization’s setup, channel selection, and so forth.
Automated features
Some of our automated targeting features include the following:
- Geographic targeting: By default, we place ads within a radius surrounding an advertiser's location.
- Interest targeting: Based on what we learn from an advertiser's digital properties, like their website, we place them in an established interest category.
- Relevant sites: Ads appear on relevant sites throughout your ad network. Contact a representative to discuss white lists.
Our ad serving engine performs many other automated targeting tasks–like contextual targeting–that help get an advertiser's ads placed in front of a valuable audience.
Best practices
When setting up targeting, consider the following in order to "hit" your target audience:
- Use multiple media channels. You can do this at once in a single campaign, like one using the Omni-channel objective, or start several campaigns at once, each using different channels.
- If you upload your own ads, upload an ad in each possible size. This ensures that the platform can place ads in all ad unit and placement types.
- If applicable, set the campaign's geographic radius to about 20 miles.
- Specify geographic areas where you actually want to market. For example, a business might be in a town of 100 people, but its clientele comes from a nearby urban area. Target the urban area, not the business location.
- If your campaign is not placing as many ads as you expect, expand your geographic settings, wait 24 hours, then check reports to see if ad impressions have increased.
- Carefully consider the messaging and appearance of creatives, the timing of your campaign, and related elements. The targeting concept goes beyond just where you want your ads to appear and who you want to see them.
While it's best to hit the ground running with intelligently crafted campaigns, we know optimized campaigns require data and analysis. Watch your reporting accordingly and make changes to running campaigns when appropriate.