Display Channel : A Push Marketing Strategy
Display as an online advertising channel is more focused towards reaching out to the prospective audience out there on the internet. The nature of the channel is to give as much reach as possible and get the message in front of the right audience who might be interested in buying your products or services.
It plays an important role in supporting to steer the prospects down the marketing funnel and ultimately converting them as customers. If you are someone who has good understanding of attribution modelling or conversion attribution, you must be well known with the fact that even though this channel does not get you lot of direct conversions but has a contribution in assisting the conversions from other digital channels such as Search, Social or Direct. It is usually looked at as a channel to create awareness among the audience.
In addition, programmatic display to be precise is a way in which an advertiser can spread awareness within the targeted audience by showing them the right message at the right time by understanding the customer purchase journey. This is where the various strategies used in programmatic advertising come handy. Showing your brand’s value and vision to a new customer assuming them to be at the top of the funnel and then creating a messaging focused on the value proposition of the brand to audience who know about you already can be said as some of the key benefits of using programmatic advertising technologies. They help you in identifying the customer’s journey with your brand.
Programmatic Advertising for Re-marketing
Programmatic is all about data, and re-marketing is a powerful way of leveraging your first party data to target the audience who have already visited your website at-least once. Whenever, anyone surfing the internet lands on your website, a cookie is dropped on the browser of the visitor which helps to understand how the visitor is behaving. These behavioral signals can give some very useful insights related to the user’s buying intent.
Similarly, you can place a small piece of code on your website known to us as tracking pixels or Floodlight activities (In DV360) which help in capturing audiences in the your advertising platforms like DSPs or Adserver technology platforms. These audience cookies can then be used for targeting them on the open internet in a brand safe environment.
Recency Targeting
The cookies which are collected on the platforms have a look back window. A Look back window is nothing but an eligibility criterion created by the advertiser on the platform to define how old a cookie can be at max to be in that particular cookie pool. For example – If the look back window for an audience created for shopping cart abandons with a 30 day membership criterion, no cookie who’s last visit with this action older than 30 days will be included in the targeting.
Understanding of the audience membership duration, which is the look back window is very important in order to use the recency targeting strategy for re-marketing. The recency based re-marketing strategy is a very strong way to segregate your audiences within the audience pool.
So What Difference Does It Make ?
One of the biggest benefits on segregating your first party audience for re-marketing is to optimize your spends towards the most recent visitors of the website as the intent levels of those visitors is higher compared to the older audiences.
When you use recency targeting for your re-marketing campaigns, you will also notice that newer the audiences, higher is the CPM bid for those but the CPA or CPC is lower and vice versa for the older audiences.
The above chart shows you how the CPM for audiences who visited 1 day ago is the highest but the CPA results show some strong performance where as even though the CPM is the least for 30 Days audience recency but the CPA spikes up.
How Can This Be Setup Up?
You can create a separate Insertion for Re-marketing in your campaign and allocate the decided budget to it on the insertion order as shown below.
Make Sure that you select the “Control bid & budget at line item level” in the Insertion order setting so that you can control the budgets on the Line Item level.
Now once you have created the Insertion Order, create separate line items according to the recency you want to target your audiences, In this example we will create 4 line items targeting 1 day, 7 days, 14 days and 30 days recency. You can keep all the other line item targeting same for all the line items such as demographic targeting and frequency capping. Using Auto-bidding strategies best suited to your campaign goal work the best. If you are looking to optimize your campaign towards a CPA goal, “Minimize CPA” is your best bet.
The below picture will give you a clear idea of how to get this setup up.
Now is the main part where you select the audiences recency in your line item settings.
Go to “Line Item Details >> Add targeting >> Audience Lists” and select the first party audiences you want to target. Once you select the audiences, change the recency of the audience which is present just in front of the first party audience name. In this case we will add “1 Day” for 1 day recency line item and so on.
After completing this, you should be all set to push your campaign live and see how it performs for you.
This tactic may not perform very well for all the industries as it also depends on the nature of the product you are trying to advertise.
Coming to the end of this post, I would also like to share an article on “Prospecting & Retargeting Strategies” shared by iProspect which gives an overall view and understanding of how both the strategies can be used in a display channel funnel approach.
