Guide to Campaign Targeting: How to Narrow Down Your Audiences

All entrepreneurs worth their salt are familiar with the audiences they want to target. That said, transforming this knowledge into practical actions isn’t always straightforward, especially if you’re running an affiliate marketing campaign.

Like other forms of paid advertising, choosing the right targeting settings for your campaign can help you make the most of your budget. The thing is, developing a solid targeting technique requires a significant amount of practice and an organized approach. Furthermore, you also have to truly understand audience members in order to filter out users who have a low chance of converting.

At ActiveRevenue, we’ve worked with thousands of affiliates that have developed successful campaigns by systematically narrowing down the users that see their ads. Below, we’ll go over the benefits of implementing the right targeting settings and teach you how to narrow down your target audience.

What Happens If You Don’t Narrow Down the Target Audience?

Before going over the steps you need to take to narrow your targeting, let’s take a look at what happens if you choose not to filter out certain users.

If a campaign has broad targeting, the ads behave like a billboard because they are displayed to users from around the world at any given time of the day. By narrowing down your targeting, you can create a dynamic ad that only appears under certain circumstances that tend to result in higher conversion rates.

By setting the right targeting settings you can avoid:

Irrelevant Traffic

Some offers only target certain types of users. If your targeting settings are not adjusted properly you’ll end up attracting irrelevant traffic, so most users will not be interested in your ads. Needless to say, this is a devastating blow because it affects virtually every single other part of your campaign’s performance.

Higher Ad Costs

Attracting irrelevant traffic means that you’ll have to invest more money in order to generate a profit, which will exponentially increase your ad costs. This includes your cost per click, cost per conversion, and all other metrics related to the price you pay for each interaction you register.

Lower CTRs and Conversion Rates

Click-through rates (CTRs) and conversion rates are among the most important metrics for any campaign. These help ensure that your ads are relevant and that the content on the landing page aligns with your creatives.

If you choose to implement wide targeting, you’ll always end up with loser CTRs as well as subpar conversion rates. The goods news is that you can narrow your targeting settings and make sure that only users who have a high chance of converting see your ads. 

Remember, you can target users based on device, location, connection type, and other variants. So, study your audience and analyze the performance of your ads after launching your campaigns to increase your chances of success.

How to Narrow Down Your Audiences

Learning how to narrow down your audience is crucial for the development of a successful campaign. Besides a deep understanding of your customers, you also need to be familiar with the unique elements that shape your industry, take the time to create customer descriptions, and decide how you will group these users.

Analyze the Market

You may already have a good amount of knowledge about the vertical you’re working with. But, you should take the time to conduct a light market analysis using resources available to you online. Google Trends is always a great place to start, so try to find search trends by demographic information such as age, location, and gender. Also, ask yourself:

• How will I attract my audience to the product/service?
• What techniques are other affiliates using to target these users?
• When does the product/service you’re advertising work best?

Craft Descriptions of Fictional Customers

Now that you have a better idea of the industry as well as a good level of knowledge about your customers, you should start creating buyer personas. In simple terms, buyer personas fictional customers that help you develop better marketing content. A buyer persona is a stereotype for users you want to target, so create one for each type of customer you want to attract.

Separate These Customers Into Segments

Once you finish creating all of your fictional customer descriptions, you can group them into different segments. For example, customers who are more likely to be attracted to visual elements or certain types of language should be grouped together. Now, you have the main groups of customers you want to target, so work with your traffic source to filter out users who don’t fit this description as much as possible.

Get More Tips to Boost Campaign Engagement

Contact ActiveRevenue today and learn more about narrowing your audience and launching a successful campaign.