Targeted advertising: what it is and how to use it. Targeting, types and targeting settings What is targeting on the Internet

Targeted advertising is completely distorted. It breaks your heart when people forgive you for setting up targeted advertising. Hence the incorrect use of all derivatives of this word: “let’s start targeting our advertising post to such and such an audience.” !?

This is not the classic debate about whether marketing or marketing is the correct pronunciation. Here's what Wiki says about targeting

After studying our article, you will be able to not only control your contractors and have comprehensive information about targeting technology. You can set up advertising yourself. Get ready! 🕜 Reading time is too long. More than 15 minutes.

What is Targeted Advertising?

To make it more clear: let’s say you accidentally learned information about your loved one that he did not share with anyone. You found out that he urgently needs money. You show up at your friend’s with a straight face and say: I would like to keep the money in a safe place. Can you keep it for a couple of months? Are you starting to understand? Targeted advertising is when you make an offer on time and to the right place. When you hit the bull's eye, and the buyer is sure that he is incredibly lucky. Purely by chance.

Targeted advertising on social networks

But now even the most incredible platforms provide the possibility of targeting: Qiwi payment terminals allow advertisers to send SMS taking into account age, gender, geo-referencing (the place where a person most often tops up his balance).

Mobile operators offer to use their subscriber data for relevant SMS mailings. Even Twitter, which no one really uses except Donald Trump, has included the ability to segment its audience for us entrepreneurs.

Is it possible to set up high-quality advertising yourself?

Our answer is yes! Not only can you, you should try it yourself. And this article will allow you to learn how to configure it.

Why? Yes, because we have extensive experience working with clients who have no idea about advertising.

Such clients seem toxic to us. The best client of our company is the one who understands targeted advertising better than us.

You are probably wondering two questions:

Why will an agency that makes money from targeted advertising train me?
If I learn how to set up advertising on my own, then why do I need all these specialists?

The immediate answer is a spoiler:

We'll tell you a little about who needs targeted advertising.

At a minimum, every business should try running all types of targeted advertising at least once.

Women's themes work best. If the cost of your product or service is below 3,000 rubles, rub your hands together. These include sugaring, manicures, children's products, and products for pregnant women.

If your offer has impulsive demand and a real time limit, you also have good chances. Impulsive demand should look like this: “Shut up and take my money right now!” This includes information business, network marketing, restaurant business, and catering.

If your product has a wow effect: losing weight from 350 to 60 kg in two weeks, a stun gun, a ticket to Bali for 1 ruble, and so on. (This is, of course, a bit of humor. Your advertising should be truthful, but evoke a burning desire)

Obviously, the subject of real estate, advocacy, and network marketing, which is concentrated only on the product, is difficult (the business opportunity is sold, but bottles of living water are not)

Targeting is suitable for almost everyone. It makes no sense to list all the niches that can receive tons of clients from social networks. But for those who are definitely not suitable for this type of advertising, you are welcome to look for yourself

Targeting purpose

The purpose of targeting is to find and encourage the target audience to take a targeted action on our social networks or on the website.

Conducting advertising.

Once you've launched your first Instagram advertising campaign, your work has only just begun. This includes endless tests of audiences, connections, and creatives. You create all supposedly interested audiences, then cut content for each, then substitute 1 audience for 1 creative, for one placement, and then mix everything until you get 30-50 ads for several advertising goals ()

There are a million reasons why the cost of your application may change today. The most banal thing is a holiday. People are drinking and are not active on Instagram. Accordingly, the audience becomes smaller, the competition for it is higher, and the cost of display skyrockets. This is called auction overheating.

Or the advertising banner has burned out. This means that the same creative was shown to the target audience at least once. Everyone who wanted has already left a request, the rest are starting to get annoyed by your persistence. At best, you will get a decrease in activity under the advertising post. At worst, advertising is hidden and complaints about the account are made. All this reduces the relevance of the ad. So much for the increase in cost.

It is for this reason that you should monitor the effectiveness of your advertising on a daily basis. Or better yet, several times a day, so as not to end up in the dumpling shop.

Cost of targeted advertising on Instagram

In the context of the cost of setting up targeted advertising from agencies, we have already decided. It ranges from 15K to infinity.

For those who plan to set up targets on Instagram on their own, it is important to understand the cost of the application and coverage.

Here we'll just give the numbers:

The second most popular source of traffic in targeted advertising is Facebook. It is no different from Instagram. The only difference is the choice of placement. Advertising can also be configured through Facebook ads manager.

You don't need to have an Instagram account, but you need to create a Facebook business page. And publish advertisements on her behalf. You can set up display in the feed of mobile or desktop devices. But impressions will be carried out only on the social network Facebook.

You can create advertising yourself in the same way as on Instagram. But ordering customization from an agency, oddly enough, is much more difficult. The fact is that Instagram is in great demand (not always deservedly so). And cunning agencies are starting to raise the price of setting up Facebook to the level of the cost of setting up Instagram.

Remember one thing: when they charge you with “huge labor costs” to create an advertising campaign on Facebook, they are lying to you.

If an advertisement was created on Instagram, then transferring it to Facebook takes 1 minute of time and 4 clicks from the targetologist. If they ask you for money for a second social network, run away from them. These are greedy people. For the agency, such a movement is not difficult at all. They just pump money out of you. We would not recommend ordering advertising from this agency.

Contextual and targeted advertising. What are the differences?

There are a lot of differences. They are all principled. The very first difference is the principle of receiving an advertising offer.

In targeted advertising, you find the client yourself. He's not looking for your product yet. He's only interested in it because you have cool pictures on your account. And the client is not averse to learning more about you. But he doesn't intend to pay the money yet. Traffic is colder and requires more development by the sales department.

BUT. Search traffic is obviously limited. Even if you die, there are no more requests for “I’ll buy panties in Moscow” from month to month. Demand varies slightly and varies depending on the season. Now they are looking for “underpants with fur, MSK delivery,” and in the spring, “with pheramones and an amulet of sexuality.” But the demand is DIVIDED and it is exactly what it is. It can only be changed by transnational companies through huge investments into the media. Or classic media (TV and radio) can accidentally create hype thanks to a viral story about fur panties with a heated proboscis.

In other words, you know the approximate volume of requests for your topic every month and year.

This is a plus, because predictability is always wonderful. But also a minus. Because you do not influence the formation of demand. You are just biting off a piece of the pie that you had enough money for.

Thanks to your content and approach to advertising content, you can encourage even someone who a minute ago did not know about the presence of your offer to buy here and now. It’s not just advertising budgets that decide here, but also creativity and humor. This is a definite plus

Search traffic is obviously more expensive and there is always less of it. If you have only two employees in your company: you and your mother-in-law, this is an option for you. Applications are hot, there are few of them, people are eager to buy. The main thing is to call on time and not place a purchase.

And if you have a hungry sales department of 5 snouts sitting and shoveling 2GIS?

Is there constant turnover because of this? People get tired of cold calling and lose hope of making a sale. In this case, traffic from social networks will help load your sales department up to its neck.

Well, another plus to the treasury of targeted advertising is the speed and cost of testing. To assemble a semantic core for search advertising, you need to work hard for a week only on the queries for which your advertising will be shown. Of course, the labor intensity multiplied by the number of hours of work of a specialist will fall on your shoulders. If your shoulders are fragile, you can create an advertisement in Yandex and sit without pants and a budget. And save up for the budget for another month. The cost of targeting is usually 30-40% cheaper. And in terms of implementation time, it’s faster.

Setting up advertising is inexpensive.

Just imagine that somewhere you come across a post with an advertisement from some specialist targetologist. He asks only 3-5 thousand for his work.

Wow, cool! This is 10 times cheaper than these agencies!

Please note: is this a sponsored post? If this is just a newly-minted, overtrained type, enlightened after training, whose post was reposted by Aunt Glasha, then there is only one scenario. The guy took the course and wants to tinker with the settings with his crooked little hands and gain some experience at your expense.

Just so you understand: the cost of a client for marketing services for an agency ranges from 3 to 50 thousand rubles (indefinitely, depending on the cost of services). So where is the money left for the service? Tax, manager's payment, risks of refund.

And the agency also wants to eat. Therefore, don't expect miracles. Those who are able to do the job well will ask for good payment.

Do I need to undergo training to set up advertising myself? We will probably become captain obvious and answer YES. We motivate our advice with numbers.

Courses on targeted advertising cost from 10 to 50 thousand rubles. We'll tell you why there's such a difference below. Now let’s imagine that you decide to buy courses from a reputable online school for 30K. And let’s imagine that you have completed the entire course and understand more or less the logic of creating an advertising campaign.

Now let’s fast forward to real life, when the average advertising budget spend per day is 3,000 rubles. For 21 working days this is 63,000 rubles. Without training and on a whim, you can actually make advertising yourself and even receive applications. What if we say that there is such a process as “budget optimization”. And if, thanks to this knowledge, you can save 15-20 percent of your daily budget, you can buy any training without thinking. Its payback period is 2-3 months - this is realistic.

Let’s make a reservation right away: if you have a micro-business and micro-targeting plans, then don’t bother. If you spend less than 10,000 rubles on advertising, and you even have some requests, great. Calm down and continue to quietly move forward on your own. There is a lot of free information for this. Objectively, if advertising costs are small, then there is nothing for you to optimize.

Why are the prices for courses different?

We want to be honest. Sane specialists produce approximately the same content. Everyone is spying on each other. And you will receive the most important elements of setting up targeted advertising in any of the schools.

Pricing looks like this:

Multiply the client's cost by the positioning of your school and add a little greed.
The presence or absence of life consultations, support webinars, group quests and other various activities to give greater value and weight to training.

As a result, if your school makes money only by selling training, it is forced to attract advertising traffic to sell its courses. And you pay for this traffic. And of course, a company that only trains constantly screws up and complicates the learning process - this is a fact. They don’t make money from anything else, so they are forced to inflate the price.

Those who have intelligence above the level of bread will take one place to the nose and understand mathematics.

How to choose an online school?

It is difficult to write objectively, since we ourselves provide training services to our clients. But let's try.

If we are looking for courses to improve our skills, we usually proceed from the logic:

When training is a side activity, that’s cool. This means the company is practicing and not infocyganizing.

Of course, it’s nice to work with playing coaches, and not just with teachers who digest content and spew out their own something. They only make vinaigrette. Unfortunately, it is difficult to recognize such people before purchasing a course. As a rule, they are promoted online through a personal brand. On advertising creatives they use their photo and give a thumbs up (a stupid jacket and a stupid facial expression are required)

Above we described the humorous stereotype of Infocygan, “Vodoleylo,” “there is more water than in water.” Of course, you certainly won’t buy from such people. We encourage you to monitor the content provided by your chosen school. Study their posts. Understand the logic. And if trust awakens inside, buy it. But never impulsively.

Training summary:

If you have time and some money for trial and error, go to the official page

It is no secret that the most relevant characteristic of advertising quality is its thematic content. Roughly speaking, we are talking about the correspondence of materials that call for the purchase of a particular product or service with the interests of the people to whom they are shown. For example, you need to advertise fishing nets where you can meet fishermen. A tool with which you can achieve maximum alignment between the interests of the client and the advertiser is called targeting.

Targeted advertising is...

The name “targeted advertising” comes from the English word target, which translates as “goal”. It turns out that such advertising can safely be called targeted, since it is intended exclusively for the audience that is interested in showing the ad and receiving the advertised product or service.

How this interest manifests itself can be seen from our example with fishermen. If a person really may need to purchase a fishing rod, he will certainly respond to such an advertisement and, most likely, will even make a purchase if the offer is really worthwhile.

According to sales statistics, which are maintained by almost all companies in any field of business, you can see that targeted advertising is the most effective sales channel. The only things cooler than this are rumors and personal recommendations from regular customers to their friends and acquaintances. Therefore, in fact, this method of promoting a product is most valued.

Where is this type of advertising used?

In fact, the scope of application of this type of advertising is unlimited. You can start, for example, by placing advertisements with the services of a lawyer near the courthouse (as the most vague targeting) and end on the Internet, which is shown on thematic sites (where the selection of materials is carried out that the user will see down to his browser version). You can see examples of targeting everywhere, and, in fact, almost everywhere this format of promotion and dialogue with the client can confidently be called the most effective.

Yes, this is not the easiest way to convey information to the client - targeted advertising. The cost of promoting products in this way significantly exceeds the prices for wide-reach advertising services - one that immediately appeals to many segments of the population, representatives of age and social groups (a striking example is traditional billboards placed throughout the city). However, as already noted, sales statistics justify the costs of this promotion format.

in social networks

Relatively recently (over the last 5-7 years) it has become extremely popular and with it targeting from networks. Naturally, Facebook became a pioneer in this area, showing how narrowly an advertiser can set the boundaries of the audience that will see his materials. Setting up targeted advertising on social networks allows you to clearly define groups of users, taking into account their age, gender, place of residence and even personal interests. For example, you might want to show your ad to people who read a specific author, belong to a sports group, or enjoy watching a specific genre of movies. Agree, with the set of characteristics that social networks have for each user, the possibilities for advertising targeting are simply unlimited.

A little about targeting options

In order to understand how accurate such advertising can be, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with an example. So you will clearly understand that targeted advertising is the real key to the success of advertisers.

Let's imagine that you need to increase sales of a bookstore located in a particular city. You just need to create a beautiful one to receive orders and set up an advertising campaign on the network where you would like to try to work (let it be Facebook). So, all you need to do is compose the title and text of the ad, select a picture, and then indicate a specific group of people: these should be residents of your city (this is obvious), as well as people who like to read (probably these are those whose interests indicate “Books”). This way, the circle of your audience will be significantly narrowed to several hundred people, but the campaign broadcast in this way will ideally fit the definition of “targeted advertising.” This is a great way to get the required amount of traffic that is most interested in your store. If you see after a certain period of time that there are too few people who clicked on the ad, you can expand your audience by adding additional interests, for example, “Reading” tags and others.

Targeting Tools

There are many ways to gather the necessary audience. In fact, part of success lies in approaching the promotion of a product or service correctly. A set of targeting criteria combined with a title and description can give the best effect in generating a significant number of sales and, as a result, high profits.

In addition to the already specified age, gender and interests, people who will see your ad can be selected based on other criteria. For example, this is the marital status in which a person currently resides; the educational institution in which he studied or is currently staying; place of work or military service; a person's native language. In addition to these and other nuances, it should also be added that an ad can be compiled based on a set of specific categories, rather than one indicator. For example, you can refine your campaign so that your ad is shown to people aged 20 to 25 rather than just 20-year-olds. Advertising settings on social networks are, in fact, quite flexible, which is undoubtedly a huge advantage of the latter as platforms for promotion.

How to start your campaign?

Do you think that to start advertising on Facebook, you need to sign contracts and contact advertising agencies? But no! A huge advantage of this and other similar platforms (Vkontakte, Mamba and many others) is that it is very easy to start working on them as an advertiser! It is enough to have a registered account on this network and spend half an hour to figure everything out.

Let's say it briefly. First you need to create a campaign, name it, indicate the main parameters (time and frequency of its launch, budget, category). Next, you need to create the ads that will be broadcast as part of this campaign. The next step is the procedure for setting up targeted advertising (this means clarifying the criteria discussed above). You don’t need any special knowledge to operate on social networks. It is enough to have work experience, as well as a general understanding of how this or that social network works with its partners. Both can be learned through direct experimentation. By the way, you can start with small amounts - for $100 you can test several ad display tactics at once and identify some patterns. Do not forget to analyze the statistics.

Collecting response information

In general, speaking about statistical data in advertising campaigns on social networks, they should be called the most important component. Why, you ask? The fact is that it is on the basis of statistics that an advertiser can improve the model on which he builds his advertising campaign. Only with the help of specific numbers that indicate sales, the number of clicks on the advertising link, the percentage of conversions (the ratio of people who visited the product page and those who made a purchase), as well as other parameters, can the ad be successful. The rest is up to experimentation. You can, for example, create dozens of ads, collect statistics about them, identify the most successful ones and remove those that failed. Actually, such a simple strategy is the most effective, although it undoubtedly requires certain financial investments at the experimentation stage.

Alternative to social networks

Social networks are a great way to promote a product. True, it works mainly for the entertainment sector and some services. Selling pumps for compressors, for example, through Facebook will not work, since this is too specialized a niche. This is where contextual and targeted advertising comes to the rescue.

In fact, it can be called an alternative to social networks, since it is placed either on search engines directly in the Google or Yandex results, or on sites that are connected to the affiliate program of these advertising platforms. Let's say some spare parts catalog runs ads from Google Adsense, and you order advertising and use the Adwords platform to manage this campaign, advertising your store.

The difference with social networks is obvious. If there targeted advertising is the interests, age, gender and other characteristics of a particular person, then in the case of “context” the link is made to the requests that the person makes in the search engine. For example, if he types in the phrase “buy spare parts for a Kalina,” an ad will appear in the search results with a link to a store with spare parts for the Lada Kalina. This presentation of information is, of course, also highly targeted and effective from a sales point of view.

So, targeted advertising is a real mechanism for promoting goods and services. This is a rejection of the model of offering our services to the widest possible audience that has been familiar to us since the old days (remember the joke with the announcement “I’m selling a garage” on the air of “Field of Miracles”). In fact, advertising should be as targeted as possible; it should be delivered exclusively to those who may be interested in it. Consequently, the most accessible tool that can now provide targeting at a sufficient level is the Internet. And of course, targeted advertising itself is an excellent channel for organizing sales of your goods and services. The main thing is to be able to use it.

Today, every entrepreneur is aware of the need to use promotion tools to ensure sales. Advertising, first of all, informs consumers about the product and its properties, which ensures the first sales. However, television, street or radio advertising require huge financial investments, which not everyone can afford. But there is an alternative - targeted advertising.

The word targeting comes from the English “target”, which translated into Russian means “goal, targeting”

We present the advantages and disadvantages of targeted advertising in the table.

Channels and types of targeted advertising

For many entrepreneurs, targeting, as a promotion tool, is inextricably linked with social networks. But it is not so. Yes, social networks offer the service of targeting advertisements, but the same service is offered by search engines, online media and other resources.

An example of targeting in search engines is, which is based on user requests.

Depending on the settings of the target audience, ads distinguish the following types of targeting:

Targeting by interests or contextual advertising;
Territorial, when we configure the geographic area for which the ad will be displayed;
Targeting by topics. In this case, the resource on which the advertisement will be displayed is selected;
Targeting by user behavior. This is a new direction in targeted advertising, which allows you to set up targeting in such a way that the ad is displayed only to those users who were previously interested in your product (set similar search queries, visited sites in your niche). The use of targeting based on user behavior has become possible thanks to the development of browsers and the emergence of the ability to track users on the Internet using cookies.
Choosing the time period for displaying an ad is another type of targeting. This setting allows you to select the time of day and days of the week for displaying advertising;
Targeting by number of impressions.
Demographic targeting allows you to select a target audience based on demographic parameters: gender, age, marital status and others.

The mechanism of targeted advertising

That is why the most common channel for targeting has become social networks, in which users voluntarily provide their personal data when registering.

Remember, the VKontakte registration form contains fields such as gender, age, city, marital status, favorite films, books, interests and much more. Based on this data, the system allows you to configure all these parameters when choosing the target audience to display your ad.

After you have configured all the parameters, written the ad text and uploaded the image, your ad will be sent for moderation. As a rule, moderation takes no more than a day.

Let's look at the cases in which your ad will be rejected in most resources:

Erotic content of an ad (text or picture), advertising of porn sites or sex shops;
Advertising of alcohol and tobacco products;
Advertising of financial exchanges;
Advertising of competing resources to the resource on which the ad is posted (you cannot advertise Odnoklassniki on Vkontakte).
Errors in the ad;
Ad text written in capital letters;
Use of user personal data in the ad text (Name, age, etc.);
Provide contact information in the ad text;
Using other people's logos and names.

Once you've been moderated, your ad will appear based on your targeting settings.

Goals and objectives of targeted advertising

Informing consumers about the company, product and its characteristics;
Sale of goods;
Entertaining consumers, attracting attention;
Consumer education.

As for the tasks that targeted advertising performs, we have identified the following features:

Attracting the attention of narrow groups of consumers aimed at making a purchase;
Express information about the product (the consumer will receive other information if desired by clicking on the link);
Instantly making a purchase or other targeted action (registration, calling, bookmarking a product).

Setting up targeting

Step 1. Creating a portrait of the target consumer. Before moving on to creating the ad itself, it is necessary to analyze the user’s behavior on the Internet, identify his interests and preferences. The more information you have about your target user, the more accurate and effective your targeted advertising will be.

Step 2. Selecting an ad image. Familiarize yourself in advance with the acceptable image parameters for the resource where you want to place your ad. Remember that the image must be of high quality.

Step 3. Configure the target user's parameters (gender, age, geography, interests).

Step 4. Come up with a bright title and ad text. The test should be short and convey the essence of the message.

Step 5. Select the cost and payment method for targeted advertising. Here you have two options: pay-per-click and pay-per-impression. On average, the cost of one impression is 3-5 rubles, the cost of a click is 5-7 rubles.

Retargeting

“Retargeting” involves showing an ad only to those users who have already been familiar with your product (visited your website, watched an advertisement for a product, viewed a product in an online store).

Allows you to bring back a consumer who left without purchasing by reminding him about the product. This tool is usually implemented in the form of various Internet resources that the user visits after viewing your site.

The mechanism of retargeting is simple:

A special code is embedded on your website that reacts when a user visits certain pages of the site (for example, a page with a product description);
Information that the user has visited the landing page is stored in the browser (in the form of code) or directly sent to the sites where the user is registered (social networks);
When a user visits sites where retargeting advertising is set up, these sites read the landing page visit code and show the user an advertisement for the product that the user recently viewed.

Currently on such resources as Vkontakte, Facebook, Yandex, Google.

Increasing website conversion has a beneficial effect on website promotion in search engines, and this is now one of the main developed trends in. It’s very good when users come to your site and take targeted actions there.

Another reason to use targeting is to reduce the burden on staff. Imagine running an ad without targeting it.

For example, you work in a specific city (Nizhny Novgorod), but advertise throughout Russia. In this case, indicate your phone number, email address or feedback form.

And imagine that you are starting to receive requests for some services or goods from all over Russia. They constantly call you on the phone and bombard you with letters by mail, but, unfortunately, almost all of these orders will not bring you the desired result.

For example, when working in Nizhny Novgorod, you will not be able to send goods to Kazan or Voronezh. This will be unprofitable for you and you will not have a configured scheme to work in these regions.

Types of targeting

Let's now take a closer look at the main types of targeting.

Ours goes first geo-targeting. The main task will be to select from all those that are perfect geographically.

If you work only in Moscow and the Moscow region, then you have no need to show ads throughout Russia.

Time targeting

The next view is time targeting. It is particularly used in contextual advertising, where you can easily set the display time for your ads. You can set the desired time of day or specific days of the week.

If there are companies that can accept orders for their goods and services around the clock, then the advertising itself can be shown around the clock. In those companies that do not accept orders outside of business hours, it is imperative to limit the display time of advertising.

Thematic targeting

The next view is thematic targeting. Don’t forget that there are special tools with which you can customize the theme of advertising platforms for the placement of your ads.

For example, on the Rotaban exchange (banner advertising exchange), you can select the desired category of sites to place your banner. That is, by thematic targeting we mean the selection of some thematic platforms where our advertising offers will appear.

The subject of the ad and the site should match as much as possible. Otherwise, don’t expect the maximum effect from your advertising!

Demographic

Another type is demographic targeting. It can be used for targeted advertising on VKontakte. Here you can select the gender and age of the person. Then this data will be selected from the profile of all users of this social network.

If suddenly a person fills in the age, city and date of birth fields, then your advertisement will be broadcast to him. Of course, it will be shown provided that you have selected the appropriate age range and the city itself in the advertising campaign settings.

In general, you can not only set up demographic, but also geographic targeting (city, age and gender). As for targeted advertising on VKontakte, there is also a thematic type of targeting using a special tool for selecting interest groups.

Let's look at an example of advertising targeting on one of the services I invented. Let's imagine that we have a dental clinic that offers dental prosthetics services. Here are the steps to take in our case:

It is necessary to indicate the main service. For us, this will be a dental prosthetics service.
Set the geographic view. Let’s assume that such a service is active only in the Kazan region. Accordingly, geo-targeting will be with the exact indication of the city of Kazan. You can also test it in contextual advertising and also take cities that are located near Kazan. It would also be good to analyze this point. However, Kazan must be specified, since this type of targeting will definitely work here.
Setting time targeting. In our case it will be temporary - around the clock*. It's already marked here. As I already said, if our website has a system for accepting orders or a system for making appointments online, then we can target 24-hour operation.
Setting the demographic view. Here you need to start from the service or product itself. That is, here we take into account the target audience. Our dental prosthetics service is most likely to be relevant for men and women aged 45 years and above. It is this service that will be most needed for this target audience in terms of dentistry.
Setting up thematic targeting. If we are going to use some advertising platforms (for example, for), then we can set up thematic targeting on the topic “medicine” or on a narrower one (dentistry). If we select some sites that answer the question about dentistry, then we can place our banner there. If there are not very many such sites, then we can select a broad category (for example, medicine) on some directory sites or on regional sites. And accordingly, you can also place there some kind of banner, or an advertising article, or something else.

Here is an example of targeting for our service. That's all for me! Now you know what targeting is, why it is needed and what types of targeting exist. We also discussed one example of advertising targeting a little higher.

Sakharov Ilya

What is targeted advertising?

The name of this tool comes from the English word “target”, which translates as “goal”.

Examples of targeted advertising and its appearance

In 2018, in the vast majority of cases, this term refers to targeting on social networks. We'll talk about it today. I’m sure you’re familiar with similar advertisements on VKontakte:

Odnoklassniki:

Features of targeted advertising

The key difference and at the same time advantage of this tool from all other types of promotion on the Internet is the ability to accurately select the audience to which your ad will be shown. Let's look at this point using the example of the most popular social network in Russia - Vkontakte.

The illustration below shows all the categories for which you can set up an advertising campaign:

Don't be intimidated by this variety. To run an advertisement, it is not necessary to configure each item - any of them can be left blank. But, of course, the more accurate your selection, the more likely it is that only your target audience will see the ad, and money will be saved.

Note that regardless of whether the user’s personal data is indicated in the profile or not, the social network algorithm will still show advertising that suits him. It analyzes dozens of different parameters that few people intentionally change: the pages a person follows, the groups he is a member of, the posts he likes, comments and reposts, the sites he visits, and many others. In general, don't worry if your audience segment is too narrow. The program will handle it.

Analysis of targeted advertising

To measure the effectiveness of your ads, there are metrics in the advertising account. You can watch:

Number of ad impressions;
Number of clicks from the ad;
CTR (This is an indicator that traditionally measures the effectiveness of targeted advertising. It is equal to the number of transitions divided by the number of impressions);
eCPC (This is an indicator that measures the average cost of one click from an advertisement. It is calculated by dividing the amount of money spent by the number of clicks);
Target audience (The number of people who potentially fit the criteria you set for the ad);
Audience reach (The actual number of people who saw your ad);
Number of likes;
Number of reposts;
Number of comments;
Number of actions completed (For example, if an ad calls for joining your group, you can find out how many people joined it thanks to it);
Demographic data of the audience who interacted with the ad (Gender, age, city).

All data is presented in a very accessible form: graphs, tables and diagrams. Even a child will understand it (we checked).

The difference between contextual and targeted advertising

These two tools have a fundamentally different approach to audience selection.

Contextual advertising is aimed at those who are already somehow interested in the product you are promoting. For example, an ad for a store that sells paraphernalia of the Russian national football team will be seen only by those users who have previously searched on the Internet for tickets to the team’s matches, news about it, scarves in the colors of the flag, or broadcasts of competitions. This audience is loyal to advertising because it is interested in the product that is offered to it.

The situation is different in targeting. This type of advertising does not respond to the user’s desire to buy a product or pay for a service. It works for those who may have such a need. The targeting of the Russian national team merchandise store will be seen by people who follow football players’ pages, comment on match reviews and are members of fan groups.

Targeted advertising price

The cost of each campaign is calculated individually. There are two approaches on VKontakte: payment for 1 click and payment for 1,000 ad impressions. Both have pros and cons. I will discuss this issue in more detail in an article dedicated to setting up and launching an advertising campaign.

This effect exists in almost all types of advertising. I'm sure this has happened to you too. Let's take an everyday example. If you always get to work the same way, then periodically you notice something new: a cafe, a banner, a traffic light. However, after a few days you stop paying attention to them. Psychology, nothing can be done.

Retargeting

This tool is not suitable for projects that have just begun to promote themselves on the Internet. But if you have been promoting for at least a few months, then it can be very useful.

For example, if you have a database of email addresses of former clients, you can set up an ad so that only they see it. This can help bring back an audience that has already left you. Or, if you have a company page on a social network, you can show the ad only to those who have already subscribed to it.

Conclusion

Targeted advertising is one of the most effective tools for online promotion. Be sure to use it if your company already has social media pages. In one of the following materials we will look at how to create and launch your first targeted advertising campaign. Subscribe to us on social networks so you don't miss anything.