Prospecting Programmatically
As we all know that digital display and video advertising come under the upper funnel of the overall marketing strategies for most businesses. These are push strategies or prospecting strategies where we aim to reach as many prospective customers as possible in order to educate them about the product and create an affinity among them for the business’s offerings. Programmatic Advertising hence empowers us with the ability to be able to reach the right audiences at the right time using advanced machine learning algorithms backed by the individual internet user’s data.
The Google Display & Video 360 is one of the leading Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) in the market used by advertisers/agencies to trade digital ad inventory in real time.
Today, We are going to discuss the top 5 prospecting tactics you can use to reach as many prospects as possible.
1) Google Audience Targeting
The First tactic which you can use in order to reach new audiences is by using the audiences created by Google such as Google Affinity/In-market audiences. Google categorizes internet users into audience segments according to the interests and intents of those users towards specific topics. Advertisers, can then use these audience categories according to their targeting in their campaigns. For example, If an E-commerce site selling sports equipment wants to target people who are currently looking for Sports & Fitness equipment can use the In-Market audiences categorized as “Display & Video 360 Audiences » In-Market Categories » Sports & Fitness” in DV360.
Limitations-
- Google Affinity audiences targeting is broad and would not perform the best for hard KPIs such as conversions and sales.
- The In-Market intent of the audiences is temporary and it is hard to see a clear picture about the intent of the user. Though, Google audiences are trusted in the market as they have show good performance in the past.
2) Contextual Targeting
Targeting users who are currently reading content or topics around things which are relevant to your business offerings is another way of targeting prospective customers on the web. This tactic in particular shows that the users who are reading relevant content have a higher sense of intent and might show interest in the business’s products or services. For example – If an Airline company wants to promote their summer sale offering to people who are looking to book flights. The Advertiser can then target the audience using contextual tactics where the ad can be shown to the particular audience on content related to travel, trips to destinations or so on. In this case, some of the content categories we can target are “/Travel & Transportation/Air Travel” and “/Travel & Transportation/Travel Guides & Travelogues“.
Limitations-
- The platform takes about 24 to 48 hours in order to crawl and categorize new content. This might sometime lead to missing out on inventory available on content which had been recently published but not categorized.
- You might not always find the exact content categories you are trying to target. In such cases, you can target broad levels of relevant content categories which best define the targeting.
3) Lookalike Targeting
The lookalike audience targeting tactic is one of the advanced prospecting strategies. In this tactic, you need to feed in the first-party data to the platform. Then on the basis of the first party data, the system will try and find out more audiences who have have similar characteristics and behavior to your first party audiences and show them the ads. You can use this prospecting tactic to find out new audiences who are similar to the one who have purchased products from you in the past. For instance, If you have a first-party audience of successful transactions on the website, you can use that audience to find lookalike and then show the lookalike audiences your ads. These type of tactics help you give an extra stretch to your campaign’s reach in the market.
Limitations-
- The list used for targeting lookalikes should be have active users in the last 30 days.
- The targeted list should contain at least 500 active users so that the system can find accurate patterns and look for similar traits in new audiences. Larger the Audience pool better for the system to find audiences accurately.
- Line Items serving under the “Story” Insertion orders are not supported for lookalike modelling.
4) Custom Affinity Targeting
The Custom Affinity Targeting feature in DV360 allows you to enter a combination of Keywords and URLs which which best define your target audience. The Interests fed into the system by you will help DV360 to define an audience without limiting the scale of your targeting resulting in being able to reach more audiences who might potentially be interested in buying your product or services. One thing to remember here is that Custom Affinity audiences will be audiences with a browsing history where they have shown affinity or interest towards the kind of keywords and URLs/Apps you feed in. This does not necessarily mean that these are audiences who are currently on a lookout for the products but definitely have shown signs of interest.
Limitations-
- The DV360 reporting system would not be able to give a detailed report of which of the keywords or URLs under the audience helped the most in getting results.
- Once the audience is attached to an active Line Item, you cannot make changes in the audience.
5) Custom Intent Targeting
The Custom Intent audience targeting is also a feature similar to the Custom Affinity Audience and the creation of such audiences is also done in the same manner. But as opposed to the custom affinity, this type of an audience will help you in creating a list who have currently shown an intent of purchase related to the keywords and URLs you have added to create this list. It can be said that the Custom Intent audience is an advanced version of Google In-Market audiences where you get to use your own keywords, URLs and Apps to reach specific people through the medium of programmatic media.
Limitations-
- The Custom Intent audience targeting is only available on the Google Ad Manager Inventory.
- The Keywords added are targeted on a “Broad Match” and are not case sensitive.
- Once assigned to an active Line Item, changes cannot be made to the audience
Excluding First-party Audiences
In order to make sure that your prospecting targeting does not overlap and show your existing site visitors a different message as they could also be under the above mentioned audiences. Make sure that you exclude the first-party audiences from your prospecting tactics.
Conclusion
In the fast moving digitized world, brands need to keep their marketing strategies updated and always be on a lookout for exploring new ways in which the audience in the market can be catered with the right message. Using programmatic advertising, prospecting to the right audiences at the right moment can work very well. The above mentioned features of targeting audiences in different ways are some of the tactics to reach out to as many prospect as possible with the right approach to spread awareness, educate and convert potential customers.
For more information related to Display & Video 360 you can visit the DV360 support
