Why audience targeting trumps site targeting every time

With Google AdSense and similar advertising platforms, marketers focus their campaigns primarily on contextual site targeting rather than audience targeting. While site targeting may be better than nothing, counting on it as a way to reach enough of the right consumers every time would be a mistake.

Programs like Google AdSense and others rely on analyzing an online user's past browsing history, often with the placement of pixels and cookie trackers. Not only is this practice seen as intrusive by most consumers, but it also doesn't always portray an accurate portrait of the type of consumer you're targeting. People browse websites for a number of reasons: professional research, school reports and even just random browsing. A person's search log does not necessarily reflect who he is as a person or what he's looking for as a consumer.

That's where audience targeting comes in. Audience targeting is the marketing practice of identifying a select consumer audience based on multiple demographic and psychographic factors and then exposing them to tailored advertisements that have proven correlation to their purchasing history and expressed interests. While most marketing professionals would agree that this approach is preferable and more effective, many consumer marketing professionals fail to invest in audience targeting methods because they feel that the technology is not sufficiently mature.

Forrester Research in 2010 indicated that 58 percent of marketing professionals would be willing to increase their online ad spend if better ad targeting was available to them, according to Collective.

Since 2010, online audience targeting has made significant progress. It is now possible to target ads based on the profiles of consumers who have voted with their wallets for the products and services of a particular company. Marketers use the data to create digital look-alikes, or predictive models that statistically match similar consumers who are also likely to be interested in those products and services.

Semcasting's Audience Targeting provides businesses and marketers with invaluable analytics tools to help them narrow in on exactly the right consumers. Using advanced predictive modeling techniques along with their patented offline database, Semcasting can help marketing associates build multi-channel campaigns that offer the best return on their investments while minimizing the amount of wasted ad spend that targets the wrong people.