Nicole Bernier — August 1, 2019 — August 1, 2019
No matter what your marketing strategy looks like, we’re all trying to achieve a similar goal: to get the right messages to the right people at the right time. Improving content marketing can help you craft the best messages, while analyzing your total active market can make sure you’re targeting the ideal prospects. Timing often poses the biggest challenge.
Digital advertising networks provide you with the tools to time your messages correctly. But whether you’re on the Google Display Network or any other platform, getting timing right in your campaigns requires more than just clicking a couple of buttons.
With the right data, you can take advantage of ad retargeting capabilities to find the perfect timing for your marketing messages.
Where Marketers Go Wrong with Ad Timing
One of the biggest roadblocks to effective digital advertising timing is a misunderstanding of PPC budgeting.
So often, marketers plan out their digital ads and find that they’re going through a month’s budget in days or weeks. This is commonly an ad frequency issue. It’s easy to think that, since you’re paying per click, it would be more effective to focus on high-frequency placements to reach more people.
This might feel like a shortcut to effective ad timing. But, in reality, you end up wasting your budget putting repetitive messages in front of people who would never become customers in the first place.
Timing problems with ad retargeting are also caused by default cookie windows. Google Display Network and other platforms will set your campaign to a 30-day cookie window. While that might work for a subset of your prospects, you can’t assume that default campaigns will optimize ad timing.
Still, knowing that you need an ad frequency limit and a customized cookie window is only half the battle. Making campaign decisions that will ultimately improve ad performance is more difficult.
Digital ad timing comes down to a series of data decisions — intent data will set you up to make these decisions most effectively.
How Intent Data Contributes to Ad Timing
Not enough marketers take advantage of the scheduling features of digital advertising networks. Most are happy to get by with generic, 24/7 schedules that aren’t tailored to increasingly-complex B2B conversion paths.
Intent data gives you insights that will help fine-tune settings on your digital ad campaigns and get the highest ROI for your campaigns. But how exactly can you apply third-party intent data to your ad campaigns? There are three key ways that intent insights will contribute to better ad timing:
- Focus on Conversion Path: Ad performance isn’t necessarily about click-through rate. If you find that you’re seeing high volumes of clicks but those visitors aren’t turning into customers, you aren’t finding the right prospects at the right time. Intent data provides you with insight into the steps that ideal prospects have taken in the buyer’s journey that will help you more effectively customize ad spend. When your ad campaign factors in the specific conversion paths of individual accounts, you can get the right messages to the right contacts at the right time.
- Segmenting Target Prospects: Default retargeting campaigns will send ads out to the largest possible pool of prospects. In many cases, the only criteria is whether or not they visited your website within the last month. Intent data gives you granular behavioral data that can help you make the most of advanced targeting features on ad platforms. Instead of retargeting to visitors of your website, you can create deeper qualifications that optimize the timing of ads and improve conversion rates.
- Personalizing Ad Content: One of the biggest problems with digital advertising is that marketers think they can run the same display ads over and over again. It’s a spray-and-pray approach that minimizes ROI and wastes valuable resources. Combining intent data with powerful features on ad platforms means you can create custom content that is delivered precisely where and when it will be most effective.
If you’ve ever been frustrated by retargeting campaigns that seem to follow you everywhere you go across the internet, you know there’s an art and science to digital advertising. Advertising platforms give you the technical capability to reach exactly who you want, when you want, but intent data is what unlocks your ability to actually do so.
It all starts with investing in the right intent data. If you want to learn more about working with intent and applying it across your marketing strategy, download our free report, Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data.
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