3.No company wants to waste money and show ads for their product to everyone. Targeting will help tell about the product to those who might be interested in it.
What is targeted advertising
How Targeted Advertising Works
Targeted Advertising Formats
How is targeted advertising different from contextual advertising?
Advantages and Disadvantages of Targeted Advertising
How much does targeted advertising cost?
How to set up targeted advertising
Where to launch targeted advertising
Own advertising accounts of the sites
Expert advice
What is targeted advertising
Table of Contents
In the circle of professional marketers, targeted advertising is considered to be advertising that meets one of two conditions:
1. Placed through social media advertising accounts.
Ads can be shown on social networks, such as VKontakte or Odnoklassniki, or on third-party sites that are part of advertising networks, for example, on Mail.ru websites. It is not necessary to launch an ad on a narrow audience segment. For example, a reach campaign for a carbonated drink across Russia, without age restrictions, is also considered targeted advertising if it is broadcast on social networks.
2. It is configured by targets, but is broadcast on social media platforms.
Target, or goal, is the setting of advertising for an audience that meets certain criteria, such as a specific gender, age or location. An example of such advertising is promotion through myTarget, where you can set up the display of an ad not only on social networks, but also on other sites.
Targeted advertising allows you to achieve different goals, which can be divided into two categories:
Performance
achieve business indicators
● Sell a product or service
Advertising can make a specific offer to the user to buy and lead to the product page on the website.
● Increase the number of repeat purchases
It is possible to use retargeting – to target ads to those who have already made an order and offer them another product that may interest them.
● Attract users to the app
Targeted advertising can lead the user to the game page in the app store.
● Collect contacts of potential clients
With the help of an ad, you can collect data on your target audience in order to make personal offers for them in the future.
Brandformance
increase brand awareness
● Tell about a new product or service
In the ad, you can tell about the product and provide a link to details described on the company’s social media page or website.
● Attract subscribers to social network accounts
Targeted advertising to users who are interested in the company’s topic will help attract a new audience to the social network page.
Read Also:UTM tags: why are they needed and how to set them up
How Targeted Advertising Works
The essence of targeted advertising is that it works with users who are potentially interested in a product or service. This does not mean that they searched for them on the Internet and planned to place an order. Rather, these are people similar to those who have already placed an order and can potentially buy the product. Let’s say a camping equipment store knows that their main audience is men and women aged 26-40 who are interested in traveling, sports, and nature. If the store’s marketer launches targeted advertising for this audience, it is likely to be effective.
Most often, targeted advertising works on the auction principle. To begin with, the advertiser defines a budget, which can be set for the entire period of the advertising campaign or limit the daily expenditure. In the first case, the algorithm itself will distribute the budget by days of promotion, but will not go beyond the general limit. In the second case, no more than the amount set by the advertiser will be spent per day.
The next step is to designate a specific category of users to whom the advertiser wants to tell about his product , which is actually targeting .
In order to understand who is best to show advertising to, you need to know the characteristics of your audience. Targeted advertising training begins with analyzing your own clients in the “Traffic Manager” course .
In addition, the advertiser selects the campaign goal and, depending on it, sets the bid for the target . For example, if the goal is reach, then the CPM model is in effect – cost per thousand impressions, if the goal is transitions to the site, then the CPC model is in effect – cost per click.
When a person logs into a social network, the algorithm holds an auction among all the ads that are targeted at this audience. To equalize advertisers using different types of bids in the auction, the algorithm calculates a cumulative indicator. For example, in VK Advertising it is called eCPM (effective CPM).
The whole process happens automatically, instantly and unnoticeably for the user.
The ad with the highest eCPM rate wins, and that is what the user ultimately sees.
Targeted Advertising Formats
Each platform has its own types of targeted advertising. In general, they can be divided into four categories.
1. Graphic targeting
Advertising in the form of images that can go without additional text or with text. On some platforms you can show only one image, on others – several. Images can be of different sizes, for example, vertical banners are broadcast in VK Clips, and square and horizontal ones – in the social media feed or on partner sites.
2. Video targeting
Advertising videos that are shown on platforms, or in-stream format — advertising inside other videos. For example, this could be a pre-roll, which is shown before watching the main video, or a video ad that pops up on top of the page content. It is possible to show a video that the user can skip, or videos that are impossible to skip. In addition, mobile app advertising has rewarded videos — a video that must be watched to the end to receive game currency or another bonus in the game.
3. Audio targeting
Voice advertising that the user hears while listening to music. For example, on VKontakte, such advertising is heard by people without a subscription to VK Music.
4. Text targeting
Ads containing only text. For example, only this format of advertising is possible in Telegram.
How is targeted advertising different from contextual advertising?
Advantages and Disadvantages of Targeted Advertising
Like any other channel, targeted advertising has its pros and cons:
✅ Large number of formats
Even if the advertiser does not have a professional video or a high-quality banner, he can make targeted advertising using product photos, stock images or just text.
✅ Wide coverage
The audience of social networks is huge: 100 million people visit the VKontakte network every month. Even with narrow targeting, almost any advertiser can tell a large number of users about themselves.
✅ Multiple goals.
Targeted advertising allows you to set up different target actions and is suitable for both branding and performance marketing.
✅ Audience hypersegmentation.
Thanks to various targeting options, the channel makes it possible to show ads to a fairly narrow target audience. For example, girls aged 18–20 who live near the Sokolniki metro station, study at a nearby university, and are interested in anime.
❌ Cold audience.
Targeted advertising is aimed at users who do not yet have demand for the product, so it can be less effective than, for example, contextual advertising or SEO , which respond to a specific user request.
❌ Not suitable for everyone
As experience shows, in most cases targeted advertising does not work for B2B companies that sell products and services for businesses. This is due to the fact that when entering social networks, the user, even if he is a CEO or head of the purchasing department, wants to have fun, and not solve work problems.
How much does targeted advertising cost?
The cost of targeted advertising depends on the selected audience segments and goals. For example, one of the most expensive groups of users is considered to be iPhone owners aged 30-35 who live in large cities. As a rule, such people have various needs and money to satisfy them. Many advertisers want to tell this category of people about their products, so the price of such targeted advertising is high. In general, the more heated the auction is for a specific user segment, the higher the price of advertising will be.
At the same time, the cost of targeted advertising may be the same for advertisers with different budgets. It is quite possible that the price of an ad impression with a budget of 100 thousand rubles and 1 million rubles will be similar. It is just that the advertiser with a smaller budget will receive fewer impressions.
Often the price of targeted advertising is estimated by the cost per action (CPA). For example, for a developer of apartment buildings, the target action is an application from a potential client, which the manager was able to call. CPA for such an advertiser in targeted advertising can be in the range of 10,000-20,000 rubles. In the auto business category, the CPA for an application for a test drive of a car can be 3,000-5,000 rubles. And the CPA for an application for a trial lesson at a children’s English school is 1,000-2,000 rubles.
The cost of CPA can also be used to calculate the necessary budgets. For example, if a developer wants to receive 100 high-quality applications (KPI) from targeted advertising per month, he may need a minimum budget of about 1 million rubles (CPI x KPI). And for 30 applications per month for an online English school, you need to budget at least 30,000 rubles.
It is important to note that these are average market figures. It happens that with very high-quality creative and well-configured targeting, the developer’s advertising will bring quality leads for 5,000 rubles or even cheaper.
How to set up targeted advertising
Let’s look at setting up targeted advertising using the VK Advertising platform as an example.
To launch a campaign, you don’t need to have a company page on a social network or link your personal account to it. You just need to register on the platform, create a new advertising campaign, upload images or videos, and add texts.
It is necessary to decide on the platforms — that is, the sites whose visitors will see targeted advertising. By default, VK Advertising has automatic selection, but you can specify the sites manually. Depending on the platform, the advertiser can choose different placement locations.
Now you can set up targets:
● Region
You can limit the display of ads to users living in a specific country or city. Or choose hyperlocal targeting, which will show an ad to users within a radius of several kilometers from a certain location. This is relevant for businesses that have offline points, such as beauty salons, car services or training centers. And also for advertisers who want to tell visitors to specific places about their product without having an offline presence. You can launch an ad for an orthopedic office chair store in the area of a large coworking space that is visited by many IT specialists.
● Demographics
If a product has age restrictions or a specific age group buys it more often than others, it is worth specifying this range in the targeted advertising settings. In addition, it is useful to limit the gender of users if most of the product’s audience is, for example, men.
● Interests
In this targeting category, you can either add specific topics that users were interested in or exclude them. You can set up ads so that they are seen by those who are involved in any sport except swimming. In addition, it is possible to target ads to subscribers of specific VKontakte communities, so that, for example, an ad for a clothing store would be seen by users subscribed to publics about style.
● Devices
If a company has a website, but it is not adapted for smartphones, it makes sense to choose to display ads with targeting only on desktops. And it is better to show mobile game ads only on phones.
Additionally, in reach advertising campaigns, you can set the frequency of displaying an ad to each user. Conventionally, no more than two displays per week, so that the ad is remembered, but not boring.
The effectiveness of targeted advertising can be assessed by the number of target actions, for example, the number of clicks on the site. And if you place a pixel (code) of the advertising system on the site, you can build end-to-end analytics and track the quality of advertising right down to orders.
Read Also:How to create an ad in Yandex Direct so that it brings orders
Where to launch targeted advertising
Having figured out how to launch targeted advertising, you need to understand where you can do it.
VK Advertising
Today, it is the main service for launching targeted advertising. Through it, you can broadcast ads not only on VKontakte, but also on many other platforms:
1.● Odnoklassniki;
2.● VK projects, such as Zen, the main page of Mail.ru, content projects Lady, Children, Pulse, Auto.
3.● advertising network, which includes many sites, including Yula, Avito, Auto ru, Edadile.
4.● RuStore is a store of mobile applications for Android.
VK Advertising offers many targeting options, including unique ones. For example, contextual targeting. This format can only be launched through VK Advertising, since the advertising system has data on what people are looking for on Mail.ru platforms, such as in search or on Yula.ru.
Thanks to algorithms, you can show sneaker ads on VKontakte to users who searched on partner sites where to buy sneakers, or just looked at ads for the sale of sports shoes.
myTarget
Several years ago, the advertising system was acquired by VK, so most of the targets are now available in VK Advertising. However, myTarget still has exclusive placement sites. For example, digital billboards and screens in stores of some grocery chains.
Own advertising accounts of the sites
On some platforms, you can only promote through your own advertising accounts, for example, in TikTok and Telegram. Currently, TikTok does not allow you to target ads to the Russian audience, but you can show them to residents of other countries. In Telegram, you can target ads by user geolocation, as well as to subscribers of certain channels.
