Targeting Demographics

How Does Targeting Help With Paid Ads? 

By targeting your message to specific areas, you can use different demographics in your advertising to find your best customers. Let’s continue with our example of Dentists in the New York area. 

Location Based Targeting

Here are two scenarios: the first would target all of Brooklyn, and the second would target specific neighborhoods within Brooklyn. At first, they sound like the same thing but aren’t. By targeting specific neighborhoods instead of a particular borough, you can get accurate metrics for each neighborhood. This helps you weed out wasted ad spend on lower-performing neighborhoods. While this may take longer, it can save you thousands while receiving better metrics while doing A/B testing. 

Imagine if your paid ads for Bayridge Dentists convert more than Flatbush Dentists ads. Running a higher ad spend on Bayridge dentists would be the standard action. If you targeted all of Brooklyn, you would be happy that you were receiving sales and not optimizing where your ad dollars are being spent. This is how you find out more about your customers with targeted insights.

Detailed Targeting

Specifically for Meta, detailed targeting involves demographics, interests, and behaviors. Each of these has a lot of information that can’t be covered in one article. We will boil it down for now and go in-depth in later articles. 

Demographics

Demographics are the most basic types of information that you can base your client on. This should be taken with a grain of salt. The image shows how Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne are both male, married twice, raised in the UK, live in a castle, and are wealthy and famous. However, these two couldn’t be more different. Targeting just a demographic is the tip of the iceberg to get you the specific person you seek.

Interests

Adding a layer of interest to your targeting helps immensely. You can display your ads to their specific interests, from fitness level to hobbies and activities, to focus on your ideal target. Just using interests alone isn’t good enough. Just because someone loves to watch teeth cleaning videos doesn’t mean they are interested in buying dental equipment. Interest can be used effectively when you show your ad for toothpaste in a dental video. This would be the ideal ad placement for a customer to purchase.

Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting leverages the behavior of your customers and prospects likely to purchase your products and engage with your website, app, etc. This allows businesses to target what is the most relevant to their customers while weeding out uninterested customers. By targeting behaviors only, you don’t get the entire picture of your potential customers, but when combined with interests and demographics, you are saving tens of thousands of advertising dollars by getting to the people who will convert.

Lookalike Audiences

These audiences perform the best because a lookalike audience shows the exact type of people you want as a customer, and they serve that type of audience with your ads. The more information you have on your customers, the better your lookalike audiences can be, which in turn helps you reach your ideal customers quicker.