The Complete Guide to Audience Targeting in Programmatic Advertising

Any marketing campaign or approach starts with the STP (Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning) framework.

As a marketer, you would first create your segments that have your ideal customers. Segmentation is an approach to divide the market into user groups of homogeneous characteristics based on their likelihood to buy your product or services.

Once you know who your target audience is and how they behave, you want to reach out to them. That is what Targeting is.

And when you know how to reach your audience, you devise your messaging based on product Positioning.

Founders, CXOs & Marketers of your organization are the custodians of the segmentation and product positioning. It is a rigorous process of market testing, user testing, reading the industry & competition, and forecasting the trends to come up with the ideal segments to target and the product positioning viz a viz your competitor products. Generally, this is a one-time task and stays relevant, with little modifications, for at least a few years.

A lot depends on the way marketers and advertisers reach their desired audience segments to deliver messages as per their product positioning.

We all would agree that a robust targeting is the backbone of any campaign. Right from the media planning phase to campaign optimization, the marketer, advertiser, or the media trader needs to carefully select the desired audience profiles, which give them the best ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). Because it does not make sense to show Ads of Men's Gillette Shaving Kit to a lady unless she wants or searches for it, in which case, Contextual Targeting should also be considered.

Defining your ideal targeting mix can be a challenging task. It takes multiple iterations in campaigns to get to your ideal prospects. Before formulating a media strategy, you need to be ready with answers to the following questions -

Who are they?

Creating a customer persona involves defining the age, gender, education level, income bracket, nationality, and ethnicity, among other parameters.

How do they consume online content?

Are they netizens, technically living online? Or are they late adopters barely managing their email accounts and browsing two of their favorite cable news networks online. Do they use the web for their browsing and purchases, or they rely entirely on mobile apps? Do they use desktop, tablets, or smartphones to browse the internet and make purchases? Do they also own a connected-TV for media consumption?

Where will you find them offline?

Where do they live? Does your product cater to wider geography or only to people residing within 6 miles radius of your store?

What are their interests?

Customer Interests Is your audience more interested in sports or politics, are they interested in or looking into credible sources of information to take care of their toddler, or are they reading DIY terrace garden tutorials?

What is their (purchase) intent?

Customer Intent Are your prospects still looking for information around the product category, or made up their mind to make the purchase? Where exactly are they on the buying journey?

Let's take the example of a car manufacturer launching four car models - a hatchback, a sedan, an SUV, and a luxury car. Typically, their Media Planner would choose different targeting settings as per the car being advertised -

A hatchback ad can be shown to the mid-income segment, first-time car buyers, living in cities, and aged between 25-40 years.

The ads for a sedan can be shown to males (typically) aged between 35-50 years, probably looking to buy their second car, are climbing the corporate ladder, and lie in the upper-middle-class segment.

An SUV ad can be shown to enthusiastic or adventure loving people, looking for their second cars, who own a house and lie in the higher-income segments.

Customers/prospects in the Premium/Luxury car segment could be business owners, higher management executives, frequent flyers who love vacations. Or, in general, those with a household income of more than $100,000.

In case the manufacturer also has a reselling vertical, the ads for refurbished cars would be targeted to the working middle-class people. Timing can also be a part of this plan because working calls people are most active on the internet from Mondays through Friday between 9 AM to 5 PM.

These are just hypothetical examples; similarly, there can be numerous combinations of targeting parameters that enable marketers to reach out to the desired segments at the right moments.

How does Kritter help in finding your ideal customers?

The Kritter DSP allows the profiling of customers on various targeting parameters. A logical combination of targeting options can lead an advertiser to their desired/niche audience with precision, resulting in successful programmatic campaigns.

Let's revisit the five questions that an advertiser needs to answer to set up their targeting and see how Kritter programmatic platform can help.

Who are your customers?

Kritter provides the primary audience demographic segmentation based on age groups, gender, education level, nationality, and ethnicity (based on their browser language). Additionally, Kritter's proprietary data allows segmentation based on users' credit ratings, household income, and even net worth.

To reach out to a specific set of customers, targeting with Device IDs is also possible. In case an advertiser wants to use their list of Device IDs (IDFA, IFA, GAID, AAID, etc.), they can upload all of them together in a CSV file.

Alternatively, ads can be shown based on specific User IDs. This is used when an ad is meant to bid only when a particular User ID is present in the Bid Request. The IDs here can be Mac ID, SHA1 or MD5 encoded or a Cookie-ID, and so on.