How To Get Maximum From Display Network Marketing

Almost all the paid marketing platforms provide access to wide range of inventory that can be used for placing ads. There are several ways to target the inventory that can be used for fulfilling different marketing objectives. General marketing objectives are divided into four main categories: brand awareness (upper funnel), influencing consideration (mid funnel), driving action and building loyal consumer base (lower funnel). Once the marketing objective is defined, it becomes easier to take decision on how to get maximum benefits by setting up display campaigns.
Let's go over each funnel for a next level overview:

Brand Awareness

It definitely means to focus on something that can give wider coverage and help reaching out to the audience who have not got to the stage of consideration yet. Here are the options:

Targeting Demography: It is useful when the only criteria is to target people on the basis of their age, gender or household income. Below is an example of luxury cosmetics brand:

Targeting Affinity: Reaching out to those audiences who showed slight interest towards any topic is also another way of getting wide coverage. While browsing internet we read a lot of information, some information we just scan through quickly as we are not interested in that topic in immediate future. Such browsing pattern becomes part of particular affinity segment, which can be used to draw attention towards same theme.

Driving Consideration

Once the awareness stage is already reached, advertisers would like to choose those placements where their product is already known, just there is something in the message which can raise curiosity to learn more about the offered products. Here are some options to focus on such type of reach:

Keyword Targeting: The oldest yet proven method to show ads only on those pages which are close to the keywords added in ad groups. In this targeting, you just need to focus on building tight group of keywords so that the platform knows, which type of content is the focus for that group. When ads show up on highly relevant content then chances of engagement are higher.

Placement Targeting: This is another form of old content targeting technique in which the domains which are important for the advertiser are chosen individually. Platform also recommends websites and apps that are relevant and can drive focused interaction. Different messages can be crafted for different placements to make it more interesting.

Topic Targeting: Instead of choosing individual placements, this option provides a bundle of placements belonging to specific topics. Here also the content of the website is going to be the main focus. Showing ads on relevant content depends a lot on how the platform has categorized the website in general. Here the precision might be a problem, so keep checking the individual placements from where the impressions and clicks are coming or not coming.

Custom Affinity: It is a little narrower version of affinity targeting mentioned in upper funnel. Here instead of content of the web pages, many other user behavior related criteria is defined to narrow down the placement. It includes a combination of interest categories mentioned as keyword, places the person visits, apps they used or the urls they browsed. Mentioning url or app name under custom affinity doesn't mean that ads will only show there, but once a person visit that url he/she becomes the audience for your ad and will be eligible to see it anywhere on display network.

Detailed Demography: Narrower version of demographic targeting from upper funnel, where second level of common behavior within defined population is targeted. Such as married, homeowner, level of education etc.

Similar or Lookalike Audiences: Almost all the online marketing platform offers to target people who showcased similar behavior as those who visited the advertiser website, installed their app or watched the videos. Targeting these similar audiences can drive traffic, which could be as useful as the original audiences.

In-Market Audiences: This type of targeting is slightly inclined towards lower funnel, so we can categorize it as mid-lower funnel. Here the focus is more on those audiences who have been rigorously looking for something by either searching for it or scanning through various content available in the display network. This type of targeting can also be used for driving conversions with a layer of another content based targeting.

Driving Action

Many advertisers think of display network as broadcast marketing channel and give lower weightage when it comes to focusing on conversions. Here are some options that can help in driving conversions as well:

Custom Intent: This is a narrower version of in-market audience defined in mid-funnel section. In this targeting a combination of urls and keywords are used which is mapped with the audience behavior who are rigorously looking for something related to combination of those keywords and urls.

Website Visitors Targeting: Who better than a website visitor would be interested in advertiser's product and services. So those who visited the website, but didn't take desired actions, are of high importance and should be reached with unique messages so that they can take further actions.

App users: Though this type of audience is more useful for mobile only traffic, nowadays most of the businesses get results from mobile devices only. So, this is highly useful for driving conversions.

Manually Curated List of Audiences: Most platform also provide the option of reaching out to those users who shared consent with the advertiser to receive any form of communication whenever they have something interesting. This allows high amount of customization of messages for those who are proactively interested in advertiser products and services.

Display world is regularly evolving and there would be many more types of targeting available in future. Please share your comments or suggestions if you have come across any other form of display ads apart from the ones mentioned here.