To run a successful campaign, marketers need to understand their audiences. That understanding should go beyond basic socio-demographic information and take into account ever-changing consumer behavior and preferences, enabling a more holistic view of desired audiences. 

Quantcast empowers brands and agencies to know and grow their audiences by providing the tools to unlock these expansive insights, effortlessly. Through a combination of unique data from 100M+ online destinations and AraTM, our AI and machine learning engine, the Quantcast Platform offers an up-to-the-second understanding of audience behavior and interests, allowing marketers to reach the right person at the right moment. 

Marketers can easily gain access to insights around audience browsing interests, purchase behaviors, domain affinity, occupations, devices, demographics, psychographics, and more. You can maximize your results by following our best practices for planning an ad campaign. 

Sample audience: Squid Game super-fans 

First, to understand how marketers can use the platform to gain reliable, real-time insights, let’s consider a hypothetical audience: the super-fans of Squid Game. The TV show recently set records for Netflix as its biggest-ever series launch. Curious to know more about these viewers, we created a US-based audience on the Quantcast Platform, using Squid Game keywords. 

Not surprisingly, given its popularity, we discovered an audience size of 3.72 million, indexing slightly higher for 20 to 40-year-olds, with the demographics equally split between male and female and whether they have children, reflecting the US average. 

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Next, we dug deeper to explore the browsing interests of the Squid Game audience. In this case, as would be expected, arts and entertainment–and specifically, movies and television shows–indexed high, but interestingly, comics and animation indexed significantly higher. One way for marketers to gain further insight is through analyzing the significance of these interest categories. In this context, it is possible that people are searching to determine if the show is an adaptation of anime, comic book, or manga source material, or perhaps there is simply an overlap in interests. Online gaming also indexed highly, likely because of a proliferation of related games and Roblox extensions. 

In addition, we can use these results to observe what websites audiences are visiting. The Quantcast Platform offers the capability to see which publishers are indexing the highest for an audience, and for Squid Game super-fans, we found a lot of entertainment options; for display and video, we found comic book and game sites, predominantly. 

Marketers can also take advantage of the keyword cloud, a visualization tool that constantly updates to provide real-time insights into what an audience is consuming online. This word map enables intuitive data interpretation, with keywords to inform campaign planning and activation strategy. For the Squid Game audience, we found an interest in Korean drama (K-drama), actors on the show, Marvel comics, action and adventure genres, video games, Netflix, Genshin Impact, and Roblox, which helps to explain the browsing categories that indexed the highest. 

Audience insights: diving deeper 

Now that we’ve covered a basic example of how the platform provides audience insights, here’s how you can take it to the next level with our best practices for planning your ad campaign. 

As we did for our sample Squid Game audience, your first step is to decide what kind of audience you want to capture. You have the option to choose from over 160 different interest-based audiences, or you can enter custom keywords to get actionable audience insights. 

If you are choosing an interest-based audience, we recommend:

  • Using only up to 15 keywords, enough to reach the desired scale. (Note: it is technically possible to add more keywords.)
  • If building multiple audiences, check overlap between two audiences using the audience planner tool, to help inform your budgeting and make sure you’re efficiently spending it.
  • If using custom keywords, don’t use geo-specific keywords, to allow for greater volume. (The only exception would be if you’re a travel advertiser who wants to reach people looking for a specific geolocation, like a Caribbean vacation or New York flights.) 

Once you’ve set your audiences, they can be edited to apply a variety of different geographic, demographic, and site event filters.

Location tip:

  • You can look at your audience across different geolocations to understand how they might differ from one area to the next, and tailor your messaging, creative, and campaign strategies accordingly. You can even specify by multiple zip codes for granular insights. Note: it’s better to specify geolocation than to set a geo-specific keyword when setting up an interest-based audience.

Demographics tip:

  • You can use demographics to better understand your current desired audience or to explore new cohorts of prospective customers. For example, if your customers typically skew male, try filtering by female to learn more about this cohort and determine new ways to reach this audience.

Site event tips:

  • You can use AND/OR/NOT logic to create any combination of site/uploaded audiences to find your desired audience. 
    • View your retargeting audience by excluding your converters
    • Combine multiple conversion events together for a unified view of your most valuable customers
    • Combine your online and offline audiences together to see how your audiences change across channels
  • You can also customize the audience source by specifying the number of visits to the selected page. For example, you can create an audience based on people who have visited your conversion event at least 2 times. 
  • If you choose multiple site events, it automatically defaults to an ‘OR’ condition, but you can choose one event AND another event. You can look, for instance, at someone who visited your homepage and a specific product page; or if you sell products that are closely aligned, like [shoes and socks], you can see people who visited both product pages. 
  • You can also compare DMP segments: e.g., people who have previously purchased versus those who previously purchased AND are now looking at a recently launched product. 
  • You can exclude events with “and excluding”: e.g., people who viewed your product page but have not purchased before

Audience comparison tips:

  • You can use the ‘audience comparison’ tool to highlight the key similarities and differences between 2-4 of your saved audiences. A few examples of typical comparisons would be:
    • Converters vs. non-converters (retargeting audience)
    • Online (pixel) vs. offline (uploaded) converters 
    • Comparing your products to each other
  • Use the highlight feature to color code similarities or differences across the audiences you’ve selected. This will help cut downtime in discovering what is distinct about your audiences.
  • If you want to see more granular data, you can deselect ‘view by group’ to see a complete list of categories and subcategories.
  • You can view an overlap of saved audiences in the comparison tool to learn the unique size of each audience created and find opportunities to reach expansion audiences.
  • Try comparing audiences by date range: you can see differences during time periods up to 90 days. (For example, if you have a promotion, you can see what your audience was like during the promotion versus without it.) 

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By following these best practices, you can quickly and easily create a custom audience that provides you with the real-time, granular insights to effectively reach consumers and optimize your campaign results. You can seamlessly plan, activate, measure, and innovate with the Quantcast Platform. Watch our recent webinar on how our interest audiences and insights work, and get a demo today.