With consumers more invested in digital media than ever before, there is a greater opportunity to carefully consider your digital advertising strategy. This new level of engagement is valid across all channels, but none more so than digital display advertising.
To build the most effective strategy for a digital advertising campaign, you need to pay close attention to the driving force behind display advertising—data. With programmatic media buying making up 72% of all digital display advertising spending, there is increased importance when selecting data to use in your campaigns and understanding your data’s impact on your marketing strategy. The application of data in digital advertising allows you to bring highly relevant and striking messages to engaged customers. So what type of data is available for targeting in digital advertising campaigns?
Behavioral:
Behavioral data is based on information collected on both an individual’s web-browsing activity and offline behavior. Data collected comes from the online pages they visit or the searches they make, as well as their offline behavior, including in-store purchases or demographic details.
Geolocation:
Geolocation targeting, or Geo-targeting, is the method of delivering specialized ad content to a visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, DMA, metro code/zip code, or metro code/zip code radius. Geofencing and geoframing are geo-targeting methods that incorporate timing as an element as well. With geofencing you can serve ads to users in a specific place during a specific time or target users who were at a specific place at a time in the past.
Contextual/categorical:
Contextual targeting enables you to target a specific category or content type on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile browsers. This allows for the ability to display advertising creatives alongside relevant content you choose, such as a family travel ad on websites in the family lifestyle category.
Site List:
Site list targeting enables you to target specific websites. You can create preferred lists of websites that you would like your ads to be displayed on. This means you can bid higher for the sites or categories that have proven to lead to the best performance and block any sites or categories that you want to avoid, all through one easy-to-use tool.
Retargeting:
Retargeting allows you to target users who have previously visited your website with ads across the web. For example, you can target customers that have visited your homepage with a general branding message to reel them back in. For customers that visit a specific product page, you can serve them an ad that contains that product.
In a digital age where shoppers are savvier, more time-sensitive, and aware of their options, data is key to providing relevant information while building meaningful relationships with consumers.