If you’ve been using Google’s Display and Video 360, you’ll know all about the extensive targeting options. While some people get involved in publisher deals, others focus on auction packages, Google’s owned data for audiences, and third-party consumer data. Where should you put your attention in 2022? How do you make the most of your budget?
Today, we’re going to split the tactics into three groups - tier one, tier two, and tier three. However, we should first note that you need to try all the basic audience opportunities before expanding into other options. For example, this includes Cart Abandoners, Thank You Pages, Homepage Visitors, and Form Fill Buttons on CM360 Floodlights.
Elsewhere, you could try LiveRamp Onboarding and Customer Match List Upload through CRM Uploads. In GA360 Audiences, you have the following options: Visit Duration Behaviors, New Users, Smart List, Site Section Users. ADS Data Hub also offers Customer Groups by Conversion Funnel in BigQuery as well as Offline Data Joins to First-Party Data.
Through Search Audiences, you’ll see options for Keyword Clickers, Tag-Based and Rule-Based Google Ads Lists, and Social Audiences. Finally, Activity-Based Audiences contains options such as Campaign Converters, Campaign Clickers, and Impressions (this is typically based on leads to conversions or first-party remarketing lists).
If you’ve explored these options, it’s time to move on to the three tiers below!
Tier-One Tactics
Targeting is all about reaching the right people at the right time, and recency is the first way to achieve this. Essentially, recency determines the length of time that people will stay on your targeting lists after they perform the desired action. Based on your products and services, you can keep people on the list for the right amount of time (rather than targeting people who are likely to have moved on already!).
Next, predicted behavior is growing as a targeting method in recent times, and this is called propensity modeling. For instance, you can target by the likelihood of people to churn, convert, or unsubscribe (this is available through the Google Cloud Platform as well as BigQuery).
Also, another targeting tactic is to find people like your own customers. Even where cookies are disappearing, it’s possible to find people with similarities to your existing loyal customers.
Finally, you’ll find both custom intent and custom affinity as custom list targeting options. Google has real-time data in abundance, so using these two tactics allows you to harness all this data properly. Not only is there lots of real-time data, but it’s tailored to your competitors, brand, and audience.
While custom intent targets people as they make purchase decisions, custom affinity groups your audience based on their chosen online media.
Tier-Two Tactics
While tier-one tactics are highly recommended and will almost certainly add value to a marketing strategy, tier-two tactics are slightly less important but still worth your attention this year. Get them right and they will add value to your strategy.
Keywords
Although this shouldn’t come as a surprise, you’ll want to target the content relevant to your product, service, and brand. With this approach, you’ll learn the most relevant keywords for the video metadata or text in question.
Auction Packages
As a DV360 user, you can also use the Authorized Buyers system from Google. Here, you’ll benefit from pre-bid filters as you use Deal ID-based site lists. With targeting and performance exchange data, you get the best inventory for your strategy and benefit from effective CPMs on the auction system.
Deal IDs
We just mentioned them, and Deal IDs are designed to help users create purposeful relationships with publishers. Rather than getting second-best, you access inventory earlier than everyone else. Using a Deal ID, you also get first-party audience data which helps when you have viewability and other difficult KPIs.
Channel Site Lists
This time, you’re going further than the inventory on Google Ad Manager to find KPI-specific and vertical site lists; this covers the library on the SSP (supply-side platform).
Targeting Expansion - Affinity and In-Market Audiences
Building an evergreen audience is one thing but expanding this further and scaling out is the way to go. Reach extends and you create lookalike audiences from the Affinity and In-Market audiences on Google.
As we all know, knowledge about the audience is often the key to success. With these targeting options, the idea is to pull real-time data about your audience from YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, and other Google assets. Eventually, you learn more about your audience and their behavior across the internet.
Tier-Three Tactics
If you’re a marketing pro, you may read this guide and realize that you’ve tried everything so far. Well, if this is the case, you’ll need these next tactics. As our third-tier tactics, you can complement an extensive Google strategy.
Third-Party Audiences
It’s a mistake to think that Google’s data and your own first-party data are enough to cover everything because some actions and characteristics are only available through third-party data. As well as cookies and online questionnaires, third-party data companies use credit card data and other sources to learn more about audiences that could help your brand.
If you’re to choose this route, remember that the industry is becoming less and less reliant on third-party data. As an industry, privacy regulations are always changing, and this could mean a move away from all third-party data in the future. So long as you keep this in mind, you can still experiment while third-party data is still around; just make sure that you have other systems available if more changes come.
As a B2B advertiser, we recommend putting this tactic up a tier or two because of the help it offers in understanding a niche audience.
Different Formats
Are you bored of the same video and display inventory? Do you yearn for something different, yet still effective? In this case, you should experiment with new formats. For example, some businesses have found success with Waze, native, Gmail, and others. As well as adding some excitement to the marketing team, it can also provide a fresh lease of life for your audience because they’ve seen enough of your main creatives.
Content Categories
As the name suggests, the idea with content categories is to put your ads next to relevant content, based on categories. What’s the difference between this and standard keywords? Well, it pays attention to full content rather than just keywords.
Over the years, one of the biggest problems with keywords has been relevance. While an article might contain a few keywords, it may not be representative of the full article. For example, an article might contain the keyword ‘pet food’ a few times even though it’s all about gardening. The writer might have gone off on a tangent, but this doesn’t mean that the whole article is relevant for your niche.
By using content categories, the context of the whole page is considered rather than just keywords. Therefore, we highly recommend testing this targeting tactic on DV360.
Demographics
Of course, everybody knows that the basic targeting demographics are age, gender, and location. If we were to extend this list, we might encounter other basic details such as household income and parental status. However, the problem with these simple demographics is that they can lead to biases. Consequently, we recommend expanding the demographics and learning more about your audience.
Proximity Location
As a physical business, you might think that the world of digital marketing has left you behind. Yet, this simply isn’t the case. With proximity location and other features, you can target people within a certain distance of your physical store. Suddenly, all those within this radius see your ads and are close enough to visit.
Alternatively, some businesses are setting up proximity locations around their competitors. Therefore, people around the stores of competitors are seeing your ad. Just through campaigns like this, you can encourage people to visit your store rather than the stores of your competitors. The shorter the distance, the more likely people are to engage immediately.
Summary
At this stage, you’re ahead of the competition because you have an extensive list of brilliant targeting tactics that you can try on DV360. Remember, try tier-one tactics first because these are likely to have the biggest impact in 2022. Then, move into the second and third tiers for additional tips.
Often, we find that businesses aren’t making the most of DV360, so it’s time to test new features and make the most of the opportunity. Remember, not everything will work for your business and most tips will need some patience. When you start to use the tips in conjunction with one another, this is where you’ll see the difference. Why not get started today?