Mastering Basic Targeting Methodology With a Demand Side Platform

A DSP (demand side platform) allows you to target users via multiple formats that generally include display banners, video and native advertising. Ensure your ad has the best chance of reaching the right audience, regardless of format. In this short post, we’ll walk you through the main ways a DSP allows you to target. Don’t forget to research and fully understand your audience to select the right targeting parameters. Let’s dive in and take a look:

Geo-Targeting

Probably the most basic targeting methodology and at the very least you should apply some kind of country level targeting. Clearly there’s no point in advertising to people in another region or country if you only sell to people based in the United Kingdom.

Options include Country > state/region > zip code / post code or LAT LONG co-ordinates.

Day Part Targeting

Refers to the hours of the day that your campaign is live. We often have requests from advertisers who only want to advertise between the hours of 7am and 10pm. This is normally associated with brand safety, however, there may be other reasons for using day part targeting. Let’s say you have an app that helps people relax, well maybe it makes sense to advertise just before bed or first thing in the morning, where people are more open and responsive to your messages.

Audience Targeting

Typically allows you to select audiences based on their interest or behaviour. Here’s a quick snapshot of the most effective routes.

• Affinity Audiences (interest)
• Customer match (using email address, phone number or other method to learn more visit Liveramp
• Demographic such as age and gender
• In-Market audiences e.g. inmarket to buy a used car

Re-Targeting

We’ve all seen those annoying ads that seem to follow us around after we’ve visited a retailers site. These ads are known as retargeting ads and can have a product feed showcasing the exact products you viewed as well as other products that you might be interested in. These product feeds can be implemented using an adserver such as campaign manager from Google DV360. Most businesses go wrong with retargeting by failing to frequency cap, bombarding users with too many ads. Make sure you control the number of times an ad is seen by a user respecting the balance between selling and privacy and applying a reasonable frequency cap such as 1 in 24 hours.

Device Targeting

Perhaps the product you’re selling is an app? Well it probably makes sense to only serve ads on mobile devices, where the path to purchase is shorter. Device targeting allows you to control whether you target mobile, desktop or tablets.

Browser Targeting

Maybe you need to target Apple users only. Well perhaps a good starting point would be targeting the Safari browser whose audience is typically Apple users. Browser targeting on the most widely used DV360 platform include:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Microsoft Edge
• Opera
• Safari

We’ll look to deep dive into some of the more advanced DSP targeting tactics later but for now we hope you find the above a welcome introduction.

Photo by Yucel Moran on Unsplash Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash Photo by Daniel Korpai on Unsplash