Ad targeting is personalizing the advertising experience, so users are marketed products or services they will have a genuine interest in. Direct-to-consumer digital marketers use customer data such as age, gender, location, income level, parental status, marital status, and life events (childbirth, weddings, travel, graduation, etc.) to predict customer preferences. Ads based on these factors are created to attract the organization's ideal customers.
Business-to-business marketers may use some of the same techniques and utilize other techniques such as Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to enhance the targeting. ABM delves into a business's goals and targets—organizations can tap into these needs when choosing how to target ads.Another way to target the right people or businesses is by tracking their digital footprint. Known as behavioral targeting, digital marketers monitor their ideal customer's online activity, including websites visited, search history, social media profiles, and digital purchases.
In B2B ad targeting, organizations can build different target personas that reach different roles within a business. This information is collected and used to create ads for social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked, etc. However, Facebook ads make up the lion's share of the social media advertising world. Organizations can invest in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to reach users on Google's ad network and search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
For the ideal customer to see the ads at the right time and place, it is important to determine correct ad placement—specific areas of the screen—to garner visibility and get users to click on the ads themselves. Google ad networks allow organizations to choose which sites to display ads on—this is called managed placement. Pairing this tactic with keyword research can bring even better results. By creating a list of keywords, ads are matched to sites with similar content.
Ad targeting provides optimum business results such as: