Jump to:
- Pixel Your Campaigns
- Identify Your Clickers and Converters
- Personalize Your Messaging
- Produce Quality Content
- Expand Your Audience Reach
Marketers today face many challenges, no matter their industry. With competition coming from all angles and pervasive consumer “ad blindness,” brands must find ways to reach niche audiences with the right messaging at the right time to make their online ad campaigns more successful.
To accomplish this, you need to figure out who is most likely to complete your desired action, whether that’s making a purchase or providing you with their contact information. You can then focus on this group of people with a process called audience targeting.
Without audience targeting, you’re guessing — sending your ads out to a broad audience and hoping the right people see it. That approach can result in a lot of wasted ad dollars. Audience targeting allows you to, instead, base your decisions on data to get a better return on your investments.
What is Audience Buying?
Audience buying is the practice of planning and purchasing digital media around defined audiences and not around placements, channels, or impressions. Instead of buying “30 million impressions on premium sports inventory,” you buy “high-intent prospects who fit your ideal customer profile, wherever they are.” The audience is the planning unit; the placement is downstream.
The shift sounds subtle, but it’s not. It changes everything about how a campaign is built, measured, and optimized.
Audience buying vs. audience targeting. These are often used interchangeably, but they’re different layers of the same workflow:
- Audience buying is the strategic decision. Who you’re buying access to, what data defines that audience, and how you’re activating across platforms. It happens at the planning and trading layer.
- Audience targeting is the tactical execution. Determining the specific pixels, segments, lookalikes, and retargeting rules you implement inside an ad platform to actually reach the audience you decided to buy.
Audience targeting is what you’ll find in any DSP. Audience buying is the discipline that says targeting only matters once you’ve made the right strategic choice about which audience to buy in the first place.
Why it matters now. With third-party cookies winding down and signal loss accelerating across browsers and mobile OSes, the brands and agencies winning on performance are the ones treating audience data as the planning unit. They’re investing in first party audiences, supplementing with quality second- and third-party segments, and resolving them with identity resolution so the audience persists across every channel they buy.
How can you get started with audience targeting and use it to improve your online ad campaigns? Here are five steps for successful audience targeting.
The five steps below are the execution layer that makes audience buying work in practice. Start with the strategy (this section). Then build the tactics.
1. Pixel Your Campaigns
The first step of enhancing your audience targeting is gathering information about your existing audience. To do this, place a pixel on your online properties, including your websites and campaigns, to collect data about your audience. Pixels are small bits of code you can put on a webpage to gather information about visitors’ online behaviors. The pixels, which are invisible unless you’re viewing the source, allow your properties to read and place cookies, which provide you with anonymous information about your sites’ visitors.
Improve Your Audience Targeting Today
Your marketing technology generates pixels, which you then insert into the code of your website. The pixel will then start collecting data you can access using your marketing technology. Pixeling is one of the methods Lotame uses to collect first-party and third-party data. Whether you are working with a data collaboration platform (DCP), a demand-side platform (DSP) or a data exchange, talk to your vendor and make sure you are gathering all the useful information you can.
2. Identify Your Clickers and Converters
Improve Your Audience Targeting Today
Pixeling your campaigns enables you to collect detailed information about who is engaging with them. You can see who clicked on your ads and what they did when they arrived on your website. You can also see whether they converted.
Using this data, you can build an audience in your data collaboration platform or DSP of “clickers” and “converters.” These audience members are the ones who are most likely to become your customers. Since they’re the most likely to bring in revenue, you’ll want to focus your future campaigns on them and other people like them.
Once you’ve been collecting this audience data for a few weeks, you should have enough information to begin diving into analytics regarding your audience.
Analyzing your audience will give you valuable insights into who your audience is. You can get information about their demographics, location, interests, and behaviors. This demographic information can include their age, gender, marital status, income level, occupation and much more. You can learn what subjects they’re interested in, whether that’s sports, politics, fine dining or beauty products. You might also get details about their beliefs, values, preferences, and behaviors, such as their online shopping habits.
Gathering this information is crucial because it enables you to target your ads more precisely and can even prevent you from wasting ad spend on the wrong audiences. Basing your targeting decisions on data is much better than merely guessing. You probably have a good idea of who your audience is, but some of the details may surprise you. There are also some things you wouldn’t know about your audience based on your interactions with them alone.
For example, you might think your target audience is soccer moms, so you focus your targeted digital marketing on women ages 25 to 44. The audience profile report, however, may tell a different story. Maybe, instead, those most likely to click on your ads are people who are interested in financial products.
You can use whatever insights you glean from pixeling for your next campaign. Instead of targeting soccer moms, try targeting a financial audience the next time around to see whether your clickthrough rate increases.
Where Audience Buying Data Comes From
Audience buying is only as good as the data behind it. Three categories of signal feed every meaningful audience strategy and most strong campaigns blend all three.
First-party data: your own foundation. Site behavior, CRM records, loyalty data, purchase history, app events, email engagement. First-party data is the most valuable input to audience buying because you know exactly how it was collected, you control consent, and it reflects actual relationships with your brand. It’s a durable layer that doesn’t break when cookies do.
Second-party data: someone else’s first-party data. Through direct partnerships and data clean rooms, you can access another brand’s or publisher’s first-party data in defined, privacy-safe ways. A travel brand might partner with a credit card issuer; a CPG brand might partner with a retailer. Second-party data extends reach into people who haven’t interacted with you yet, with much higher confidence than third-party data alone.
Third-party data: aggregated audience segments. Third-party data is licensed audience data built by data providers (like Lotame) from a wide range of contributing sources and packaged into segments around interests, intent, demographics, and behaviors. It’s the easiest layer to scale and the right tool for prospecting, reach extension, and lookalike modeling.
The way these layers interact matters:
- Plan from first-party. Start every audience buying brief with what you know about your existing customers and high-intent prospects.
- Extend with second-party. Where you have partnership opportunities, use second-party to reach people who behave like your best customers but aren’t in your database yet.
- Scale with third-party. Layer third-party segments on top for reach, lookalikes, and category expansion.
(For the full breakdown, see first, second, and third-party data.)
The brands buying audiences best aren’t the ones with the most data of any one type. They’re the ones blending all three intentionally.
3. Personalize Your Messaging
In digital marketing, one size doesn’t fit all. Not every lead responds to the same messages. Any campaign aims to get the most bang for your buck, so you need to send the kinds of messages that resonate most with your audience to drive leads or sales. You can use the insights you obtain from your audience data to tailor your messaging to your audience’s preferences and interests. That can lead to much higher levels of engagement compared to merely creating a generic ad that would apply to a broad audience.
Improve Your Audience Targeting Today
For example, if you learned those most likely to click on your ads are women who love dogs, to resonate with your audience, you may want to consider including dogs in your next marketing campaign. Even if your product doesn’t relate to dogs, including them in an ad could boost engagement.
Through analyzing your audience, you might find different segments of customers are more likely to buy different products or respond to varying offers. Say you’re selling cloud-based business software. You might discover companies in the retail industry respond best to a free trial, while those in the construction industry are more likely to respond to a demo from a salesperson. When serving ads to those two different groups, you can use different calls to action based on these preferences.
Thanks to the rise of mobile advertising, marketers have even more targeting options. You can, for instance, use geographic location targeting, or geo-fencing, to send ads to people based on their location. You can include information about your nearest store, offer them special coupons when they’re near one of your stores or suggest products they may need based on their location. For example, you could serve an advertisement for sunglasses to someone at the beach and an ad for hand warmers to someone on a ski resort.
These are just a few examples of ways in which you can personalize your ad campaigns. You can customize them based on nearly anything you find out from your audience data. You can use audience insights to guide your overall campaigns and create different versions of ads for different audience segments. Segmenting your audiences in this way can significantly improve campaign performance. Segmented email campaigns, Mailchimp found, garnered 14.31 percent more opens and 100.95 percent more clicks. Audience insights also enable you to see which prospects are most likely to convert, allowing you to focus your efforts on them.
4. Produce Quality Content
Improve Your Audience Targeting Today
Targeting your ads can significantly increase your chances of connecting with future customers, but you also need to produce high-quality content. Poorly designed campaigns and ads likely won’t spark much interest, even if you target them to the right people. The competition for people’s attention is fierce, so you need ad content that stands and delivers your message efficiently.
To make your ads more engaging, use storytelling. In the past, most ads focused on the product and urged customers to use it. Now, marketers more often concentrate on the customers and how the product will help them meet a need. Show how your product fits into your customer’s story. For example, will your product help your customers be their best selves by getting into shape? Will it help them save time and take control of their busy lives?
You should also focus on the solution your product provides, rather than the problem it solves. If you do this well, customers will understand immediately how your product will help improve their lives. For example, if you’re advertising a productivity tool, focus on how much more someone can get done by using your tool, not the fact that they’re wasting time.
Ads are also becoming more visual. In a recent survey of digital marketers, 69 percent said visuals were “very important” or an “absolute necessity” for their marketing strategies. That’s because visual content is engaging and helps quickly convey your message to customers. Try including pictures, videos, and infographics in your content to boost engagement.
Ultimately, you want your consumers to not even realize your ad is an ad because it is so engaging and relevant to them. If you target your ads right, they’ll be excited to click on it. That’s when you know you’ve given the right person the message at the right time.
Audience Buying in a Cookieless World
If your audience buying playbook still assumes third-party cookies will be there to do the heavy lifting, the playbook is already out of date. Browser-level signal loss, mobile OS changes, and the broader privacy shift have permanently changed how audience buying actually works.
Three changes worth internalizing:
1. Identity replaces cookies as the connective tissue. Where cookies used to anchor audience definitions across sessions, sites, and devices, the work is now done by identity resolution. Strong audience buying programs run on a persistent, privacy-safe ID that doesn’t break when a cookie does. Without that layer, audiences fragment and frequency caps stop working.
2. First-party data becomes the foundation, not the backup. When third-party cookies were universal, third-party audience segments could do almost all the targeting work. Now, the brands buying audiences successfully start with first-party data and use third-party as enrichment and not the other way around.
3. Cookieless identity is no longer “advanced.” A working cookieless identity solution, like Lotame’s Panorama ID, is now table stakes for any audience buying strategy that includes the open web. Brands that adopted one early are seeing the same or better performance than they did with cookies. Brands that didn’t are watching match rates and ROAS decline quarter over quarter. (Case study: cookieless identity drives better performance.)
What this means in practice:
- Audit which campaigns currently depend on third-party cookies for either targeting or measurement. Those are the campaigns at highest risk.
- Make sure every audience you buy is defined in a way that doesn’t require cookies instead uses hashed emails, IDs, contextual signals, household graphs.
- Build measurement that survives the loss of cross-site tracking. Modeled attribution, marketing mix modeling, and incrementality testing are no longer “additions” to digital measurement; they’re the core.
5. Expand Your Audience Reach
Improve Your Audience Targeting Today
Once you have information about the attributes of your existing audience, you can use that information to expand your audience and grow your business.
Lookalikes
One way to expand your reach is through lookalike audiences. These audiences consist of new people who are likely to be interested in your product because they are similar to your existing customers. You can base your lookalike audience on a variety of sources, but the clickers and converters mentioned above would be an excellent place to start.
To build lookalike audiences, purchase third-party data from a data provider. You can then target the users within that third-party dataset who have characteristics similar to those of your existing audience. By targeting people who “look” or “act” like your digital marketing target audience, you focus your ad spend on those most likely to engage with your products and services.
Retargeting
Even if you expand your audiences and target your ads perfectly, most prospects still aren’t going to convert — at least not right away. That’s normal and expected, because many of them may still be in the early stages of their purchase journeys. They might be in the process of researching their options and haven’t committed to making a purchase yet. A prospect isn’t lost to you, though, if they don’t convert on the first click. You can bring them back to your site with retargeting.
Retargeting enables you to deliver ads to people who visited your website but didn’t convert. These ads aim to bring them back to the site to convert. You can tailor these ads based on the actions they took while on your site. If they left an item in their shopping cart but didn’t purchase it, for example, you can offer them a discount on that item.
Google also allows you to expand your audience based on your retargeting list. Using the Similar Audiences function for audience targeting in Adwords, you can tell Google to find new users similar to those in your retargeting list. According to Google, this tactic typically leads to a 41 percent increase in conversions.
Audience Buying Across the DSP Landscape
Once you’ve defined who you want to buy, the next question is where. Audience buying happens across a fragmented landscape (open-web DSPs, walled gardens, retail media, CTV) and a real strategy uses several of them deliberately.
Open-web DSPs. The Trade Desk, DV360, Amazon DSP (for open-web buys), StackAdapt, and Yahoo DSP are the major buy-side platforms for the open programmatic ecosystem. They’re where you activate first-, second-, and third-party audiences across display, video, audio, and CTV inventory outside the walled gardens. Most audience-buying strategy starts here because it’s where the broadest reach and the most measurement transparency live.
Walled gardens. Meta, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snap all accept custom audiences (typically hashed email or phone lists). Match rates and addressability inside each platform tend to be high, but the audience leaves the walled garden in measurement-only form. You can target inside, but you can’t see across platforms from inside any single one.
Retail media networks. Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing, and Roundel (Target) are the fastest-growing audience-buying surface. Retail media combines deterministic purchase data with on-site and off-site addressable inventory all uniquely powerful for CPG, retail, and DTC categories.
CTV-specific platforms. Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Roku, Samsung Ads, and others have built or expanded their addressable-ad capabilities significantly. Audience buying on CTV is now meaningful and growing, and it’s the channel where identity resolution matters most because it’s almost entirely cookieless by design.
How to think about the mix. Most strong audience buying strategies use 3–5 platforms intentionally not because more is better, but because the audience needs to be reachable on whichever surface they happen to be on. The audience layer is the same; the destinations are where it gets activated. (More on the activation step: audience activation.)
How to Measure Audience Buying Success
The point of audience buying is that you can finally hold media accountable at the audience level and not just the campaign level. If your measurement is still rolled up to “campaign ROAS” without an audience layer, you’re not measuring audience buying; you’re measuring media.
The KPIs that matter most:
Audience-level conversion rate and ROAS. Break out conversion rate and return by audience segment, not just by campaign. The highest-value insight in audience buying isn’t usually that the campaign worked; it’s that a particular audience converted 4x better than another one, which tells you where to lean in next quarter.
Incremental lift. Holdout testing is the most honest measurement in audience buying. Compare conversion rates between an exposed audience and a matched control group that wasn’t bid on. The lift is the value the audience buy actually created which is separate from baseline demand.
CPM efficiency by audience. Some audiences are more expensive to reach than others, but cost-per-thousand should always be evaluated alongside conversion rate. A $25 CPM audience that converts at 8% is dramatically better than a $5 CPM audience that converts at 0.4%.
Frequency and reach quality. A persistent audience ID (deterministic or hybrid identity) lets you hold accurate frequency caps across devices and platforms. Without it, frequency reporting overstates reach and understates wasted impressions.
Suppression accuracy. How well does the campaign avoid existing customers (in prospecting) or recent purchasers (in retargeting)? Suppression is one of the easiest places to find efficiency and one of the easiest to measure once the audience layer exists.
Cross-channel attribution. When the same audience can be measured across DSP, walled gardens, and CTV, you start to see assisted conversions that single-platform attribution misses. Multi-touch attribution and MMM both become more powerful when the audience is the unit of analysis.
The teams getting the most out of audience buying aren’t the ones reporting more numbers. They’re the ones reporting fewer, sharper numbers organized around the audience layer.
How Lotame Can Help With Digital Audience Targeting
Audience targeting helps you get your ads to the right people and tailor your campaigns to your audience’s preferences, so your ads perform better. Through audience targeting, you can spend less on your campaigns and get more conversions.
To accomplish this, though, you need the right tools. Audience targeting depends on data, and you need to be able to collect, organize and activate your data efficiently.
Lotame’s end-to-end data collaboration Spherical, enables digital marketers to onboard, connect, enrich and activate first-party, second-party or third-party data to get a holistic view of your audience. You can create audience segments within the Spherical platform and use our analytics tools to uncover new and valuable insights about them. Then, you can use those insights to improve your campaigns.
Are you using your data to its fullest potential? Contact Lotame today to learn more about how our tools can help you improve your online ad campaigns.
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