If you're looking for ways to refine your audience, you may want to consider adding targeting to your campaigns as a means of helping to increase their effectiveness.

Targeting for Search Advertising in adCenter

Who are your customers and how do you find them?

In Microsoft Advertising adCenter, you can use the targeting reports to determine the estimated age and gender of your audience, as well as their geographic locations. 

To run a targeting report, click on the Reports tab in adCenter and select either: Age group and gender or Geographical locations in the drop down menu.  From there, select the View and Date Range and then click Create new report.

 

 

You can also discover which times of the day and days of the week are garnering the most clicks by running hourly and daily reports.

To implement targeting, decide whether you'd like to implement it at the campaign or ad group level, and update your settings accordingly.  You can choose to either target only to a specific group, or you can use incremental targeting, which adds a percentage increase to your initial bid for that specific group. 

To learn more about implementing targeting in adCenter, visit Nora Flansburg’s post: Get Started with Demographic Targeting.

Targeting for Display Advertising Campaigns

Profile Targeting:  For your display advertising campaigns, you can add profile targeting to hone in on your audience.  Profile targeting includes:

  • Demographic (age, gender, language, income, and occupation)
  • Geographic (country/region, state/province, and DMA)
  • Time-based (day of week or time of day)
  • Access method (browser type, connection speed, or operating system)

Behavioral Targeting:  Behavioral targeting (BT) helps you maximize ROI by targeting consumers whose online behavior shows that they’re interested in specific products.   Microsoft Advertising provides behavioral targeting by blending information such as recent keywords searches and web page views on our network of sites.

We have over 140 unique audience segments available, including:

  • Fashion and Beauty with 3,000,000 unique users
  • Active Traders with over 1,200,000 unique users
  • Hotel  Seekers with 1,500,000 unique users 
  • Auto Researchers, and when including all auto segments, almost 7 million unique users
  • Healthy Heart Researchers with almost 500,000 unique users
  • Eco-Friendly Users with almost 700,000 unique users

Remessaging:  Remessaging gives you a second chance to communicate with potential customers by targeting your ads to viewers after they’ve visited your site, seen one of your campaigns, or clicked through on one of your ads.  Having been pre-qualified by their interest in your product, this audience is more engaged than the typical user.  Remessaging can also increase your return on investment by reducing wasted impressions while providing a brand-safe environment for your campaigns across Microsoft Media Network sites.

Category Targeting:  You can also target your audience by category, displaying ads alongside contextually relevant content to your industry and your potential customers.  With areas like Entertainment, Technology, and Health and Fitness, you can focus your advertising dollars to the placements that will make the most sense for your business. 

Custom Targeting:  If you have a specific set of criteria that applies to your audience you can create custom categories.  By finding sites that index high for your target segment, you can be sure the audience you’re reaching is well qualified (a high index would mean that the populations of visitors to those sites have a higher likelihood of matching your defined target audience than the population of the web in general).

Criteria options include age, gender, income, decision-making authority, and past/time-based behavior (purchased X in the past 30 days).

Here are a few examples:

  • Internet Activity
  • Type of Employment
  • Leisure Activities (Last 30 days)
  • In-Store Purchases - Apparel Stores (Last 30 days)
  • Cellular/Wireless Activities (Yesterday)
  • Vacation Activities (Last 2 years)

To get started, talk with your Microsoft account team or contact our sales team.

For more info on display in other parts of the world, take a look at Asia, Europe and Latin America

Thanks,

Katie

 

 

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