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The Power Behind Targeted Advertising

Remember when you were surfing the web for new shoes? You browsed a few stores but for whatever reason decided to hold off. You now take a break from your hunt for new shoes to browse the web and your social media. This is where you start seeing ads for the shoes you just viewed. Maybe you see ads for similar shoe brands as well. This type of advertising is simply known as targeted advertising.

Targeted advertising is one of the most results-driven advertising practices utilized by advertisers, marketers, and business owners alike. You have been targeted because you present a higher probability of resulting in a conversion (or sale) due to your interests, web-browsing activity, and overall behaviors online.

Advertising is everywhere, but we don’t always pay attention to it. Therefore, advertisers have had to become creative and adapt to our digital viewing habits by monitoring what we read, purchase, and our likeliness to convert online. This information is then stored and used to sell us products and services we may be interested in based on an assumption.

Targeted Ads Come To Us In Various Forms

Social media ads appear on social media platforms such as our Facebook and Instagram, while search and display ads may appear as you search the web on Google or Bing. Take for instance the shoes you were browsing; you viewed the pair you liked on Nordstrom. Based on your activity, stores including but not limited to Nordstrom, are now advertising to you, many times on a multitude of channels, and often, creating what is known as a marketing funnel.

Let’s talk about a few different ads you might see online.

Search Engine Ads

Paid search advertising is a technique that displays ads in search engine results whenever someone searches for the services or products offered by the advertiser.

Display Ads

Display advertisements are the graphic images you see as you scroll through a website. They often appear as banners made up of images and text.

Social Media Ads

Social media ads exist on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. They often appear as an image or video and include text headlines, sub-headers and descriptions.

All of these targeted forms of advertising are based on similar criteria including demographics, buying history, digital behaviors, interests, mobile devices and more. Simply put, the more advertisers know about you, the better they are able to target you. As consumers, when we see ads for products that interest us, we know that we have been targeted based off of the criteria above. From there, advertisers pay a fee in hopes that our visit results in a conversion. In the case of shopping for shoes on Nordstrom, the company may target and then retarget the consumer multiple times in hopes that a purchase is made. However, other companies selling shoes may also target us based on those same online behaviors. This proves just how competitive targeted advertising can be.

Talk to Peabody to get started and help your business navigate the competitive advertising marketplace.