February 25, 2015

Targeting Ads for Relevance and Scale


By Manish Mishra, Chief Revenue Officer

Let's say that you're selling smartphones - or financial services or beer for that matter - in South Africa and you'd like to market your product to your core audience.  

You know that a majority of your consumers are male.  

If your budget is big enough, you might consider advertising on ESPN.

But wait, did you know that even ESPN - whose audience is 85% male - sees mobile as a great way to reach male consumers?

Targeting Men

In many markets, men are actually more likely to shop online than women.  Plus, three quarters of mobile surfers rely on advertising to make purchasing decisions.

Advertisers - particularly when it comes to mobile and the internet - like to target their campaigns to meet the demographics that correspond to their client base.  Too much targeting though and the company risks losing its reach; the sample size can become granular and too few consumers will see the ads.  The challenge is to ensure that ad targeting has both relevance and scale.

Publisher Profiles

BuzzCity measures the demographics of mobile users who visit sites on The BuzzCity network.  We sort this proprietary data by the visitors' country of origin and are now leveraging this information to provide advertisers with more options.

Take the case of this mobile video download service.  Nearly 60% of South Africans who visit this site are men; more than half are between the ages of 20 - 30.



We're also tracking the urban/rural divide and which cities & provinces people come from.  We expect to add 'occupation' to this set of demographics in the near future.

Attribute Clusters 

By aggregating data from this and other sites, BuzzCity can now offer advertisers the opportunity to target consumers, based on these demographics, with a new feature that we call "Attribute Clusters".
So if the smartphone company, in the example at the top of this article, wants to target men, we'll deliver its ads to mobile sites that have a large (at least 65%) - but not exclusively - male audience. 

Attribute Clustering builds on other forms of targeting offered by BuzzCity:  country, day of the week, time of day and the method of accessing the Internet (PCs, tablets and mobile). 


Taken together, a smartphone seller could target Nokia users in South Africa who are predominately young males and like to surf in the morning before work . . . while being assured that the campaign still has sufficient breadth to reach a wide audience.


Note:  Attribute Clustering is only available on request.  Please contact a BuzzCity account manager for more information.