Targeting audiences the right way

Posted on December 5, 2018 by Gisela Caruzzi

Nowadays Audience Targeting is seen as a norm for every digital campaign and it seems that in most cases we are forgetting Intelligent Contextual Targeting. This “norm” is wrong & depending on the objectives of the campaign and the budget we should integrate Intelligent Contextual Targeting in the media plan. Let’s explain why.

The first instance is to understand the difference between these two separate ways to reach the target audience.

What’s the difference between Audience and Intelligent Contextual Targeting?

Audience Targeting is the most common method of targeting in Programmatic.

This targeting is 100% focused on the audience, it does not matter the content of what that audience is reading about, what matters is that the target audience is on that site (Important to highlight that good practises includes applying brand safety to every campaign which blacklist unwanted sites).

But, what is an audience? It’s a group of people that share the same characteristics: a combination of geographic, demographic interests and behavioural data that are the most likely to be interested in your brand and what you have to offer.

Audiences targeting doesn’t stop there. There are three different kind of Audiences: First-party, Second-party and Third-party

• First-party: This is the information that you have about your target audience. It could be from your website, CRM and/or other internal tools. This information is highly valuable for your business and for advertising, it has information about the individuals that have already shown interests in your products/services/company.
• Second-party: This happens when someone else shares their first-party data with you in order to work together or in partnership in order to benefit your brand. For example, in a Co-branding campaign.
• Third-party: This is a combination of demographic, geographic, interests and behavioural information we can access through partnerships with large Data companies. This play a key role when reaching new users for your brand.

On the other hand, there is Intelligent Contextual Targeting where you don’t define the audience but select the context that you want to associate with the brand. In other words, the content that you want your brand to be next to at the time that a user is reading specific content.

Before detailing the benefits of the Intelligent Contextual targeting, it is important to clarify that is not the same as contextual targeting

Contextual targeting is just a selection of keywords and categories where the banner could appear. Intelligent Contextual targeting is the most effective one, because not only does it use a combination of categories and keywords but also positive keywords, negative keywords and semantic sentiment in the same segment. As a result, the banners could be shown on pages with the most relevant and useful content but ensuring safe targeting and Brand Safety.

Intelligent contextual targeting avoids the risk of misplacement, where correct keywords and audience could target unsafe content by avoiding the real meaning of a word in a specific context or by not taking into consideration the sentiments and emotions that the content is generation within the audience.

So, now that you know the differences, which should you use??

As everything in Marketing, it depends on the objectives, budget and the size of the target audience because these always vary.

Both, Audience and Intelligent Contextual Targeting are very effective solutions when is it about achieving objectives and improving results. Sometimes it would be more useful to use Audiences and sometimes Intelligent Contextual Targeting, but if there is a possibility to make a mix, it is worth using Intelligent Contextual Targeting as well as it is an extremely effective targeting method

Here at Educate, we analyse each brief as a unique case and our experienced specialists work hard to use the best strategies to achieve our client’s goals.

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