Use Targeting to Boost Your Campaign

Microsoft adCenter offers two types of targeting to get your ads seen by the people who most want to see them. When used properly, they can boost your ad position, click-through rate and conversion rate, which can mean a much better return on your investment.

The first is called Exclusive Targeting and comes with all PPC providers. The second is called Incremental Targeting – a feature unique to adCenter.

Exclusive Targeting

Choosing the time of day, the day of the week and the location in which you advertise is an integral part of setting up your campaign. Thoughtful planning should go into when and where you advertise so you get the most out of your budget.

Incremental Targeting

You can then choose to boost your bids for certain genders, ages and places – spending more on searches conducted by men over 25 during, say, lunch breaks in Calgary.

This is called incremental targeting, and it makes your campaigns even more accurate. But with adCenter this feature goes one step further.

Leverage knowledge about Bing visitors to boost your bids to focus on particular demographics – women aged 35-40, for example.

Because it lets you set different bid prices for different types of searchers, it gives you the opportunity to:

• Pay more for clicks that are more likely to convert
• Pay less for clicks that are less likely to convert
• Target a very specific audience

This means you can fine-tune your campaigns, and increase your ROI as a result.

How Does It Work?

Once you've set your base bid, which should be the lowest amount you're prepared to bid, you can then increase it by a certain percentage according to the age or gender of the searcher, or the time of day they're searching.

For example:

A regional car dealer who sells a whole range of cars has a local promotion on the Mazda MX5 convertible roadster.

First he must ensure that his Mazda ads are targeted locally. But within the local market he can still ensure he gets more clicks from the likeliest customers, instead of costly clicks from people who won't really be interested.

First he needs to know who his customers are. He presumes they're men aged 45 - 54 – but he soon finds out he's wrong. And here's how:

• He goes into the keyword section on the Microsoft adCenter interface
• He chooses 'Find Similar Keywords' in the dropdown box of the keyword screen
• He enters 'MX5' as the keyword and hits the 'find keywords' button
• In the keyword suggestion list he clicks the keyword 'Mazda MX5' itself
• He waits a second or two while adCenter renders some graphs
• He chooses the 'Age and Gender' tab

Surprisingly, the largest age group searching for 'Mazda MX5' is females aged 26 to 35.

So now he has to boost his bids accordingly:

• He decides to pay $0.50 as the base bid
• He then pays to boost that bid by 50% if the searcher is female
• And he boosts it by a further 50% if the searcher is aged between 26 and 35.

The bidding is cumulative, so he's now paying $1.00 for the most likely demographic.

As our client profiling becomes even more accurate, the power of incremental targeting will grow even stronger.

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