Understanding Audience Extension and Its Functioning

The digital advertising sector has encountered numerous obstacles in the past few years. Regulations like the GDPR have made it difficult to navigate. Additionally, issues such as banner burn and banner blindness have caused a decline in the efficacy of ads. Finally, the rise of ad-blocking software and browser mechanisms like Intelligent Tracking Prevention have caused cookies to become unreliable.

Even through these issues, behavioral targeting is still one of the most popular ways to reach a specific audience.

Since its humble beginnings, online behavioral targeting has evolved into an incredibly sophisticated method for advertisers to reach their target audience. Data collection and utilization advancements have facilitated the emergence of methods like audience expansion.

Advertisers can reach their desired audience beyond their online sites. As a consequence this provides publishers with more revenue from their visitors. A majority of major digital publishers and AdTech platforms now present audience extensions to their customers and partners.

Both advertisers and publishers benefit from the technique. It enables advertisers to find larger audiences that better match their target using high-quality first-party data from publishers. On the other hand, Publishers can boost their revenue and attract advertisers with audience extension. This technology enables them to segment their audiences more precisely, without the need to add extra display ads to their sites.

Discover more in the following article about:

• What Is Audience Extension?
• How Does Audience Extension Work?
• Advantages of extending your audience base.
• The challenges and limitations of audience extension.
• The Future of Audience Extension.

What Is Audience Extension?

Video ad publishers are using a new technology called target audience to increase the number of viewers and audience. Thanks to this new technology, they may now follow and target their consumers online. As a result, they generate more significant revenue from website visitors and adverts.

This technology is considered a breakthrough in the advertising field. It is gaining popularity among publishers who offer it to advertisers on their sites. This is due to its outstanding results.

What Problems Does Audience Extension Solve?

Advertisers' appetite for impressions and relevant audiences is satisfied by audience extension. Programmatic ad buying has resulted in serious issues, such as ad fraud, low ad viewability, and bot traffic. This has occurred because of an emphasis on quantity over quality of impressions.

Essentially, high viewability does not always translate into greater conversion rates. More and more advertisers are pursuing lift and quality audiences.

Advertisers can choose the audiences they want to target most successfully using audience extension technologies based on the categories of visitors to a particular website. It alters the readership of a publisher in a way that produces a ready-made segment. A website's audience can be a helpful category for keeping track of visitors who have shown interest in a particular topic, item, or area. Users of a well-known college review website.

For example, a company may decide to display advertisements for the University of California, Berkeley to visitors of a well-known college review website. In basic terms, UC Berkeley might buy the college-ranking website's valuable audience for marketing purposes. Depending on the data the college-reviews website builds, it may even be able to target people of California, giving UC Berkeley access to a very relevant audience.

Types of audience extension

There are two types of targeting: retargeting and customer-interest-based targeting. Both have the goal of simplifying the process of publishing and displaying advertisements. This will be explained in the following sections.

Retargeting

If a website user views an ad, will you lose this client? If the advertisement fails to grab their attention, will the consumer be lost? What if there are deterrents before making the purchase? Will the client remain lost?

Retargeting campaigns can help you recover your customers. These campaigns show advertisements in places you know they visit, based on the information you have. This is almost certain to result in success.

Google and Facebook advertisements can help reclaim customers and ensure they purchase your product. Other advertising venues can also be used at the right time.

Interest-based targeting

You can target people with your advertisement based on their interests, preferences, and life events by using interest targeting. Pick interests that are relevant to the advertisement you're promoting to use interest targeting.

Once you have your visitor data, follow these steps to categorize it and create a better customer segment:

1- Filtering the audience

Filter your data based on your interests, lifestyle habits, location, education, and so on. This will assist you in developing a clear picture of your target audience.

2- Selecting the ideal publishing website

Define where your potential customer goes and where they spend their browsing time. Tracking them and posting ads in those locations will help attract them to the purchase process. This is the icing on the cake.

How does Audience Extension Work?

Cookies are small text files that store a user's browsing data. They provide information such as visit history and location. This is essential for increasing the size of the audience. Allowing cookies to track a user's browser activities and understanding their interests helps the advertiser plan future advertisements.

The website publisher adds code to their website. This code allows them to identify visitors who accept their cookies. These visitors become the target audience for advertisers. The publisher allows advertisers to access this information.

Advantages of extending your audience base

Extending the target audience base is a powerful solution for both advertisers and publishers. It is essential for them to increase their profits, reach, and popularity.

Benefits for Publisher

Publishers can capitalize on their audience data without having to offer their own inventory, add more ads to their webpages, or use shady tactics like refreshing pages automatically, thanks to audience extension.

Publishers benefit from audience extension, but not just the big ones. Smaller publishers with very specific, sought-after audiences can also benefit. Although they may not be sizable enough to gain the attention of sponsors, they can still generate income through their own data

Big publishers can use audience extension to identify which of their segments are most desirable for advertisers. They can then optimize the content of their high-traffic websites to attract more of these visitors. These benefits can be summarized as:

• Greater reach.
• More advertisers with more clients.
• A higher-value audience.
• High and quick profits with less effort.

Benefits for Advertisers

Publishers gain access to a ready and filtered target audience based on their advertising goals by obtaining user information from publishers in large numbers.

This service also provides a large and centralized market for advertising targeted at users in a specific geographic location or those with similar interests, providing a clear picture of what users want and are interested in.

This saves the advertiser time and eliminates the phenomenon of banner blindness, in which the user loses the ability to distinguish what he sees directly.

The large amount of data that publishers receive from their users' cookies becomes knowledge of their purchasing motivations, which is a valuable treasure for advertisers and simplifies their work at a difficult stage of development, known as "Building Awareness." They already know what the user wants.

Audience Extension Example

Consider a company that sells smartphone accessories and wants to promote its products. It could use audience extension to target audiences visiting the site of a well-known blogger specializing in Apple iPhones and serve ads promoting its accessories on a variety of other websites across the web. It does not have to advertise on smartphone-specific websites.

Alternatively, it could use data from the smartphone accessories site to target a specific audience that has looked at an iPhone several times in the last 30 days.

Audience extension increases the reach of such campaigns because ads can be served on any site where the audience visits - car-related sites, news sites, social networks, and so on. It provides more lift because the publisher data contains granular information about the users' interests and preferences.

As a result, audience extension is quickly becoming an industry standard.

What are the limitations and challenges of audience extension technology?

The significant and fruitful transformation in the digital advertising and video advertising sectors has not been without obstacles, criticisms, and challenges. Some users believe they are being exploited by the sale of their personal information and data.

However, strict rules protect these users' privacy and ensure that no information about personal behavior or personal data is traded outside of the framework of determining the potential customer's interests.

Regulations were developed in response to user concerns. This regulation is called "Do not accept cookies", and it appears as a pop-up window when a website is opened. It allows the user to decide whether or not to share their information.

Advertisers plan to create more targeted segments. They want to use the simplest and least effortful methods, as well as more effective methods. Finally, this will result in more accurately targeted segments. Technology is used to broaden the consumer base. This gives companies access to a large and willing audience, which can potentially purchase their product.

Despite fears and restrictions, such as user exploitation, technology has a great future. It carries a positive aspect of customizing the user experience. This increases the opportunity to show more relevant advertisements to users.

Are you ready to make the most of your audiences right away by expanding your audience segments everywhere?

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