Programmatic

Targeting well defined audience persona using Combined Audience


Pritham Reddy | Date: September 4, 2020

Programmatic platforms have become a very important tool for advertisers not just for their scale but also for better audience targeting using audience data. Programmatic platforms keep refining their audience targeting capabilities. Earlier this year, DV 360 announced an important upgrade which allows us to use various kinds of 1st party and 3rd party data in a better way. The new feature is called “Combined Audience”.

Combined audiences allow you to combine various audience attributes, between your 1st party, Google data, and/or 3rd party lists, to create “personas” that represent segments of your target audiences. It is unique because:
1. The only audience builder across advertisers where you can combine data from all available sources.
2. Mix and match your data from Google & 3rd party data providers
3. Reuse those audiences across the campaigns

The key advantage is that you can create any number of well-defined Personas to represent different types of user segments. By creating personas based on your users’ demographic profile, interest, intent, and behavior, you can target the right customers at the right time.

For example, let’s say you are targeting your ad to outdoor enthusiasts and are actively looking to buy a car .

Without combined audiences, you would also show your ad to people who are either outdoor enthusiasts ( affinity Audience: reach people based on their specific interests as they browse pages across the web ) or are in-market for a car( in-market audience: people who are “In-market” to purchase a particular type of good or service ) but not both..

Before
After

With combined audiences, you can now intersect the affinity audience with an in-market audience and target the ad for your SUV to outdoor enthusiasts who are also looking to buy a car.

Another example is combining people who are in the market to buy a car with people who have also visited your website. Obviously, they are of higher value to you. You might choose to also target them with a different sequential message to help in the purchase journey.

With the increase in digital spends, impression wastage has become a pressing issue. For a good user experience, it is also important to target the intended audience as precisely as possible. Combined audiences help us to target a user more accurately thereby removing impression wastage and improving user experience. Both factors help to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of digital advertising.