Jacqui Boyd explains some of the ways in which online audiences can be defined and reached.

Online advertising gives advertisers the ability to target audiences that match their core markets with a laser-like precision. This careful targeting of online ads can deliver a vast return on investment on your marketing rands and help to eliminate effort and money wasted advertising to people who are not your core audience.

Every time a user connects to a website, he or she transfers a wealth of information that advertisers can use for precision targeting of their advertisements, including browser type, preferred language, IP address and domain name.

Cookies and site registration profiles deliver even more information about website users. We have access to declared profile data like gender and age, as well as observed data about how users are interacting online, which sites they’re visiting and which advertisements they’re clicking on.

Here are some ways of targeting the right audience online:

Geo-targeting

This is one of the most common forms of targeting. It allows advertisers to use information gleaned from IP addresses so they can aim their adverts only at users located in a particular geographical region. For example, many South African advertisers target South Africans browsing international websites such as Google or CNN with their ads. Or a tourism firm could have its ads served only to international browsers looking at a South African publisher’s site.

Age, gender and other demographics

Many web publishers have databases packed with information about their registered users, including their ages, genders and perhaps even their income levels. This information can be used to serve adverts only to users within a certain demographic profile. For example, a company selling computer games might want to target its adverts at males between the ages of 16 and 28, while another company selling women’s clothes may want to attract females aged 22 to 40.

Behaviour

As the name implies, behavioural targeting allows advertisers to use information they have gathered from a user’s online activity (e.g. sites visited, searches performed or ads clicked on) to target adverts at prospects who might be receptive to their message. While this is a relatively new and complex form of targeting, it is quickly becoming popular among advertisers and agencies because of the results it can deliver.

One common form of behavioural targeting is to use interests a user has displayed in his or her web browsing patterns to target ads appropriately. For example, if you know that the user has been looking at articles about cars, you can serve an advert for a car when he or she is looking at an entertainment site.

Another form of behavioural targeting uses certain patterns of behaviour to infer that a user might be looking to buy a particular product or service. For example, a user who has read several reviews of cars and searched for vehicle pricing information is probably doing some research before buying a new vehicle.

Day-parting

Day-parting allows you to target your adverts during the times of the day or week when you believe you will reach more members of your target market or when you believe the audience will be most receptive to your message. For example, you might want to reach the broadest possible audience of 25-60 year olds, who are in front of their PCs during working hours. At night, however, children and students might be online.

News and financial sites might be busier during the day when people are at work, while more traffic might flow through entertainment and sports sites during the evening. A cinema chain might want to push its ad for the latest blockbuster film on Thursday night or Friday morning when most people are deciding what to do for the weekend.

Connection speed and operating system

Bandwidth targeting allows you to serve ads to your audience according to the speed of their internet connections. For example, a rich media ad with streaming audio and video can be directed to users with ADSL connections while a simpler banner is served up to those on dial-up. Information about the user’s operating system and browser can give you further insights that you can use to target your ads.

Targeting is complex and demands that you understand your core market’s internet habits as well as the advertising technologies and services you can use to reach them. As powerful as targeting can be, you should also be wary of focusing so tightly on an ideal customer that you neglect a huge portion of your potential audience. One ideally wants to have both reach and focus.

To really benefit from targeting, you must understand your core market, how much you should be paying for targeted campaigns and which targeting approaches will work best for you. That is where an online agency can provide valuable guidance.