5 Ways to Reach Your Audience Through Programmatic Advertising
30 June 2022 | Anisa Shkupi – Paid Media Executive at Tag Digital
If you are looking to expand your event marketing strategy or enhance your current campaigns with the latest innovations, then programmatic advertising is for you.
But what is programmatic advertising exactly? Programmatic advertising is one of the most impactful developments in digital marketing and it enables us to advertise to specific users in specific contexts, which results in hyper-targeted, super-effective ads.
Example programmatic ad on Khaleej Times:
Example programmatic ad on YouTube:
One of the main benefits of programmatic is the advanced targeting options and these are the 5 targeting options we have seen the strongest results from on our programmatic campaigns:
1. Contextual Targeting:
Contextual targeting can be used when we want our ads to appear on websites that have content that include specific keywords we are targeting. For example, if we were advertising your construction event then we could use the keyword “construction” to make sure the ads appear on sites about construction. This means that we can reach a relevant audience to your event industry. You can also exclude any audiences should you wish.
2. 1st Party Audiences:
A 1st party audience type that you might be familiar with is remarketing to all visitors on your website (this is when you visit a website and are later followed around the internet with the ads encouraging you to re-engage). When creating this audience, we are able to reach users who have previously visited specific pages or completed certain actions, such as downloading a brochure but not yet registered for the conference.
A key strategy we could then introduce is to serve ads to the user that downloaded the brochure, promoting the event the user was previously looking at with an ad encouraging them to attend the event – and that would be remarketing to a 1st party audience!
First party audiences are created by having a tag implemented on a website(s). When a tag is implemented, it will allow for us to create audiences based on specific pages or actions such as brochure downloads or button clicks. This is useful when running a visitor promotion or exhibitor promotion campaign, as we can then remarket to an audience that has showed clear interest by completing actions on the website. At this point, we would encourage them to register to attend/book a stand.
3. 3rd Party Audiences:
Third-party audiences allow us to create audience targeting using a wide variety of third-party data. The platform we use for programmatic advertising has access to over 100,000 audience segments from many trusted data sources. This allows us to target the right person at the right time and maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of your campaign.
(This is a way of targeting people with different job roles/titles, something that we can’t do on Google Ads).
4. Category Targeting:
Similar to contextual targeting which uses keywords, category targeting is also based on a page’s content. For example, if we are promoting an art event then we would want ads to appear on websites relevant to art. Another possibility that uses relevant keywords is to target the category “Art & Entertainment”. The ads would be visible on websites that are classified within this category.
This is the broader targeting option of contextual targeting, as this way we target a whole category rather than specific keywords. It is also a good approach for reaching new users / increasing your brand awareness.
5. Technology & Online Environment:
The last targeting option is online environment targeting. We can choose to target or exclude users by the online environment they are browsing on (mobile, desktop, app).
We can also target campaigns depending on the type of technology being used including device, browser type, and internet speed. We can go even further and target new mobile devices, where the device ID has been created within the last few months. This can be a good way of increasing conversion rates for campaigns that based on historical data, for example, are known to perform better in certain environments/technology.
TIP: Also have a think about what audiences you want to exclude. We can exclude locations, keywords or categories if we know that any of these are not going to include our target audience. It is also beneficial when we want to reach a lot of new users and increase our brand awareness but we don’t want to target an audience that is too specific.
Check out our simple guide to programmatic here
At Tag Digital, we have seen great success when using programmatic for a variety of event objectives. Campaigns have performed exceptionally well for brand awareness but we have also seen a boost in conversions on Google Ads campaigns when running this alongside programmatic.
If you are interested in learning more about programmatic advertising, the Tag Digital team is here to guide you through the best options based on your objective – get in touch today or get started by requesting a proposal.