At first glance, there is nothing complicated in targeting: I prepared creatives, set up parameters, and clicked “Start”. In fact, you can forget about the little things and advertising will not work. What are the mistakes in setting up targeted advertising and how to avoid them, we understand in the article? And we also find out in which niches it is effective, and in which it is not even worth trying.
Targeted advertising or “targeting” are ads addressed to your potential customers who may be interested in your products, services, or best agency tools. Target helps to attract visitors to the site, increase its conversion, increase sales, and business and customers find each other.
Typically, targeting is used in social networks based on parameters: gender, age, place of residence, income level, marital status, and interests. The parameters are configured in the advertising account – it is different for each site. You can use platforms to automate targeted advertising – they can run ads simultaneously for different sites, adjust bids and monitor all statistics.
What areas is the target suitable for?
Target is effective in the B2C segment – a customer-oriented business.
- Online stores – work for a mass audience, the user can immediately buy the product he likes.
- Thematic communities – it’s easy to introduce the target audience, set up advertising parameters, and attract people with the same interests.
- Local businesses – often people subscribe to the pages of those restaurants that they have already visited or would like to visit. Therefore, future customers can be “caught” by geotargeting – setting up advertising for a specific city and even a street.
- Info business and marketing services – people are loyal to advertising services that are associated with self-development. Therefore, courses, training, and video lessons are well promoted through social networks.
- Events – concerts, parties, exhibitions – you can gather an audience for almost any event in this way: find out what the person is interested in and make a suitable offer.
- Tourism, travel – people who want to relax and get new emotions are easy to find on social networks, especially during the holidays and summer holidays.
- Mobile Apps and Games – You can set up ads for those who have mobile devices or those who already play on social networks. Targeting will help identify “gaming spenders” who are ready to play and are ready to pay for it.
Let’s take a look at common targeting mistakes that almost all beginners go through and sometimes even experienced targeters make.
The target goal does not match the business goal
In advertising accounts, goals are divided into three categories: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. If you want users to complete a targeted action – leave contacts or buy something, you need “Conversion”. The Consideration goal is chosen when they want to drive traffic, for example for the best WooCommerce plugins. “Awareness” is used mainly by large brands and companies to remind themselves from time to time.
The purpose of the advertising campaign should be one and exact. It will be impossible to change the goal after the launch of the ad – the functionality of social networks usually does not allow this. If there are multiple goals, social media algorithms get confused and don’t know who to show your ad.
A large number of interests selected
A common misconception: if you specify all possible interests, then the social network will get a clearer idea of the desired target audience. In fact, it works the other way around – the site does not understand what to focus on, and shows ads to everyone.
Let’s say you’re going to advertise a silver jewelry store. Here you can limit yourself to just two interests: “Silver” and “Jewelry” while indicating the gender and age range of your target audience. the same can be said about yoga studio software. Then Facebook will figure out who to show ads to.
Limit yourself to one or two interests. If you have different categories of customers, apply segmentation: create several audiences, and indicate suitable interests for each.
No audience segmentation
Segmentation is needed to divide the audience according to social, demographic, gender, technical, behavioral, and other characteristics. A common mistake beginner tautologists make is to make one ad to reach everyone at once. But such a message might not work equally well for 18-year-old male athletes and 40-year-old female housewives, even if they miraculously happen to have similar interests.
Ineffective creatives
Targeted creatives are images, banners, and galleries. What format will be effective for your campaign, only testing will show. Therefore, for one campaign, you should try several formats and styles, imagine you doing Email marketing automation.
Missing call to action
A call to action is a phrase that tells the reader what action they need to take. Usually, it is a verb in the active form: subscribe, register, learn more, buy, download apps for consultants.
If there is no call to action, the conversion goes down. Users do not understand what you need from them, so it is important not to forget about it. It is important to remember that the call to action in the ad should be soft, and unobtrusive. Social networks, such as Facebook, have become “angrier” and more demanding – if the advertising is too aggressive, you can earn sanctions and get banned.
Final thoughts
Targeted advertising is a fast and affordable way to reach the target audience. But to understand all the intricacies of the target on your own is difficult and time-consuming. Get trained faster and more efficiently in online courses from practicing experts.
