Despite the complexity of today’s digital landscape, your goal likely hasn’t changed much: find your ideal audience, and reach that audience at scale — all while allowing for optimizations to reach maximum efficiency and ROAS. Historically, this was a guessing game based on large geo data sets and less-than-accurate “journal” data. Digital changed the game, but DSPs like Google’s Display and Video 360 (DV360) are adding new audience features regularly. So what does this mean for marketers in 2022?
Enter the hyper-empowered customer. She is incredibly tech savvy and, more importantly, understands what tech can do for her. This has heightened her expectations for assistance. She expects experiences that are assistive, useful, personal, and frictionless.
And how do you assist this hyper-empowered customer? You understand her intent.
DV360 has many programmatic audience targeting features to not only find the right audience, but to understand and take action based on their intent.
Affinity audiences are useful to advertisers looking to raise awareness and drive consideration among groups that have a strong interest in their products. These are based on user browsing patterns as well as content consumption. This allows marketers to show ads to people who are likely to be enthusiasts – examples include Health & Fitness Buffs, Foodies, and Sports Fans. There are 200+ signals to choose from when selecting an affinity audience in the DV360 platform.
There are several best practices and performance considerations to keep in mind when using affinity audiences.
Custom affinity audiences are, well, just what they sound like: an opportunity for marketing to build a custom audience that leverages Google’s affinity audience data. This lets you target an audience by the media they consume online or by the products and services they may be interested in. This type of audience is best for the consideration or purchase phase.
In-market audiences help marketers find users based on their intent to purchase online.
The active intent of users is updated in real time, based on behavior across the Google-owned properties. These customers have demonstrated behavior similar to purchasers.
Designed for the consideration and purchase phase, an example would be a combination of the following user behaviors:
There are a few specific considerations for using in-market audiences.
Custom intent audiences are specifically designed to help acquire new customers in the purchase phase. This is great for marketers looking for increased granularity from in-market categories. This works with DV360 to build an audience of users who show signs of intent in the products or services. However, this is driven by your described inputs. Keywords allow DV360 to have a focal point, while URLs and apps provide additional context to build a complete audience.
Proximity targeting is perfect for building an audience of potential buyers that are near to your physical retail locations. This feature allows marketers to use geolocation data to:
First-party audiences, in the age of deprecated cookies, are even more important and powerful than ever before. DV360 offers a wide variety of first-party targeting options that allow you to use what you know about your customers to reach them with the right message. This also means excluding current customers to only reach new customers. First-party audiences can be customers from your CRM, DMP, Floodlight Remarketing, or Analytics 360 lists. They can also come from engagements on Youtube, Google Ads, and Search Ads 360.
Google Analytics 360 audiences are available in DV360 for remarketing based on many parameters. Synchronizing DV360 and Google Analytics 360 (GA360) also provides unified reporting, automation, and data activations across multiple channels. This is most useful in the form of engagement or conversion data for use in remarketing or prospecting (similar audience). At its most basic level, funnel segmentation or custom GA data can be shared. However there are more advanced features such as Sessions Quality, Smart Lists, and Conversion Probability.
Lookalike modeling or similar audiences are a great way to reach individuals who share interest profiles similar to your existing customers. By targeting similar audiences, you can reach more potential customers without all the guesswork. This works by combining first-party audience data, Google’s audience targeting data, and the lookalike modeling algorithm to build a custom audience of users who are likely to engage, click, and convert with your ads. There are limitations, however.
Third-party audiences, as the name implies, allow you to create audience targeting in Google using a wide variety of rich third-party data. DV360 has access to over 100,000 audience segments from many trusted data sources, including data from 35+ GDPR-compliant providers.
Third-party data gives marketers the ability to build audiences with additional data points that may not be available with their known user base (first-party data). You can create an audience for lifestyle segments — this could include geo-location data, such as users who visit the gym or grocery shop at least once a week. It could also include purchase data, including sales data from Mastercard and Visa that identifies shoppers of a specific category or store. It can also include very specific research data. For example, if a client ran research with Experian and found their target consumer is Mosaic segment G28 – Modern Parents, they can target that segment online.
Third-party audiences can add tremendous benefit, but there are some best practices and considerations to note.
Layering is a great way to expand or refine audiences with multiple strategies or features. You’ll want to keep your campaign objectives in mind when layering. For example, awareness and performance goals should be handled differently. For awareness, you may want to exclude known customers, but for some performance segments, you may want to only include known purchasers. Adding all segments related to your target audience isn’t always a best practice.
There are three common layering types you should consider when building or optimizing audiences.
With layering, keep in mind that data providers typically sync lists every 30-90 days. This lag could be an issue for performance campaigns in time-sensitive categories.
Demographics in DV360 are a combination of user signals from across Google’s properties like Google Search, Youtube, Google Maps, and more. Demographic audiences are best measured using reach and engagement success metrics — they are not designed to drive hard conversions like transactions.
Some tips to keep in mind:
Combined audiences allow marketers to create a single audience from multiple first-party and third-party data sources, as well as DV360’s affinity and in-market audiences. These are easily saved and reused across different campaigns, making them super handy for viral or time-sensitive campaigns. This feature takes the form of the Combined Audience Builder, which is an interactive interface providing real-time feedback based on your segment selections.
There are several key best practices and limitations for combined audiences.
Activity-based audiences allow marketers to build audiences based on audience activity across campaigns. These audiences have two types: campaign activity and frequency cap.
The above audience features are best when used in a full-funnel or customer journey marketing strategy. While your funnel or journey may have more segments, most can be broken down into three main phases: awareness, consideration, and purchase.
In the awareness phase, it’s best to rely mostly on Google audience targeting data in the form of demographics and patterns. With this audience targeting, you should be focused on reach and frequency metrics that align with your lower-funnel goals. You can start to bring in affinity audiences and third-party audiences during the awareness phase, depending on your industry and goals.
In the consideration phase, affinity audiences are still a great fit and can bridge the gap between awareness and consideration targeting. Third-party data is also still a great strategy during this phase. There are a ton of great third-party audiences from many providers like Bluekai, VisualDNA, Nielsen, Kantar, and more. Moving further into the consideration phase, many marketers start to build custom affinity audiences based on past performance or niche targeting. This is a great way to build custom solutions that fit your exact targeting needs. As we move closer to the purchase phase, it’s a good idea to start looking at similar audiences and in-market audiences. Both provide a great crossover between a consideration user and a purchaser, depending on how they are set up and used.
Once you’re in the purchase phase, custom intent is your primary Google audience. Outside of that, you’ll want to start leveraging first-party data you’ve collected during the purchase process — things like CRM audience, Floodlight tags, DMP audiences, Analytics 360 audiences, and Google Ads remarketing audiences. Since these can be built from previous purchasers, you’re able to target them directly or expand for a broader reach.
Want to see the DV360 platform in action? Schedule a live demo with our experts.
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