Every marketing data provider creates audience segments for advertisers. Providers often brand their audiences as custom, suggesting that the audiences are tailored to an individual advertiser.
This is usually misleading. In practice, custom segments are often repurposed collections of IDs based on prebaked taxonomies that providers then apply across client media buys. So, the segments fail to account for the exact ideal customer profiles of their clients as well as the nuances of their business.
For example, let’s say a pharmaceutical company advertising a treatment for a rare form of diabetes approaches a data provider for a custom segment. Given how uncommon that form of diabetes is, the pharmaceutical company expects a small number of potential customers. The data provider might pull a collection of hundreds of thousands of IDs associated with diabetes off the shelf, try to hem it in with a couple keywords, and hand it off to their client as “custom.” But, because the starting collection of IDs is from a cookie-cutter taxonomy, the so-called custom segment is far too broad and imprecise, resulting in wasted reach.
You might better call this typical approach customized, not custom, audiences. At Advanced Contextual, we provide fully custom audiences — built specifically for you — and can add them to your DSP or social network ad account within one day.
The custom audience problem boils down to audience modeling and targeting. How do you reach the exact customers who will be most profitable for your brand? And how do you accomplish that as efficiently as possible?
Advanced Contextual solves precisely that problem through an approach that we call programmatic contextual. Here’s how it works — and how it can help you reach your audience as efficiently and scalably as possible.
Create your custom audience model from scratch
Rather than pulling an audience segment from a broad taxonomy and narrowing it down from there, Advanced Contextual compiles each of its audience segments from scratch.
For each campaign, we analyze billions of individual pages of content and categorize them by topic. We screen for topics before using your keywords to ensure that the content is actually consistent with your product. Then, we use the high-performing keywords you’ve leveraged on other channels, such as search, to find pages that prospects likely to be interested in your product are visiting.
Finally, we feed these example pages into our platform to find all the content that’s relevant to your prospects and suitable for your brand. In addition, we pull the IDs that are linked to those pages. Altogether, this results in a custom segment: content and IDs tailored to the specific topic on which you want to advertise.
Forget broad taxonomies — target with precision and scale
The tailored approach we take helps you eliminate waste from media buying. So, if you’re that rare diabetes drug manufacturer, you won’t waste your ad spend targeting a million IDs when your product only has 15,000 potential customers.
By building audience models from scratch, Advanced Contextual enables advertisers to precisely target only pages proven to resonate with customers. Because whittling down cookie-cutter taxonomies can only get advertisers so far.