Targeting

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is targeting?

Targeting allows you to place your ad in front of the right people and the right websites. We are targeting people and websites because they might have an interest in us or there might be an alignment between the website and our brand itself.

Google Display Planner

A very useful tool on the Google Display Network, to get targeting ideas, is called the Google Display Planner.

The Google Display Planner allows you to enter either your website or a number of keywords and it will present back to you the impressions available, associated targeting methods, placements, the ideal topics, the ideal audiences, and the ideal keywords that you may want to include as part of your Google Display Network plan.

Types of targeting

There are two types of targeting, and these are key differences.

Audience targeting

This is targeting people because they fit a certain profile. That can be they have a certain interest in things or they're in the market for something or they're being retargeted. We are targeting people in this instance. That's the first type of targeting.

Contextual targeting

This is based on the keywords that are included in the site or indeed the type of site that we'd like to target. So that's what's called topic targeting. So if a website's sole focus is cars we might find that under the automobile section of topics, or if a website's sole focus is health we might find it under the health and lifestyle topics options.

So, again, we're not targeting people in this instance, we're targeting the type of sites and that content that is on those sites. So very important to distinguish between audience and contextual targeting.