Ever wish your ad spend would only cover tangible business outcomes and not cut into profit margins? Lucky for you, this is possible with performance marketing!

Performance marketing is a risk-free solution to maximizing business or brand growth. It’s an innovative way to de-risk your marketing spend as it ensures you’re only paying for the consumer or user actions that are most valuable to your business. Performance marketing is best suited for advertisers who are looking to maximize their return on investment (ROI)!

Performance Optimizations: Audience Testing

As any media agency or seasoned media buyer will tell you it’s key to constantly and strategically optimize various aspects of your campaign in order to continuously deliver results. Standard optimizations include creative iterations to avoid ad fatigue, along with testing various bidding strategies and audience testing to expand your reach.

Audience testing is especially crucial to the success of your performance campaigns because without reaching the adequate audiences, you risk spending an excess of funds to find the users who are most likely to convert. Even if you have found your golden audiences that consistently deliver, over time, they may stagnate as audience saturation increases or as more competitors enter the market and bid against these audiences. This is precisely why it’s important to continue to test new audiences – even in established campaigns.

The Problem with Product-Centric Audiences

If your offering is a health supplement, it would make sense to target users who are interested in health supplements, right? Not necessarily.

Oftentimes, advertisers are at the mercy of the ad servers they traffic on. If you’re running your campaign on Facebook for example, there may not be any available in-platform targeting data to build an audience around ‘health supplement interests’. Even if the data is available, what are the odds that your competitors are not also bidding against this audience? Further, you may be limiting your reach by only targeting users who are interested in your specific category, brand or offering. The last point holds true if you’re limiting your targeting to lookalike or website based audiences.

Enter Correlational Audiences

If you’re wondering how to overcome these audience targeting hurdles, we’ve got you covered! Simply give correlational audiences a try!

First, let’s define the term. A correlation is a statistical relationship between variables used to describe or predict information. ​On the other hand, causation (also known as cause and effect) is when an observed event or action appears to have caused a second event or action. 

Simply, targeting audiences that are not closely tied to your offering or category (ie. correlational audiences) may be more advantageous than solely targeting causational audiences in the long run. Why? Not only are competing advertisers less likely to pursue these audiences, it also allows you to constantly expand your reach and target users who may not have shown interest in your specific offering or category.

Over time, these audiences may yield lower acquisition costs (CPA/CPL) or may result in larger conversion volumes since the reach for these audiences is likely higher! Going back to our preceding example, targeting users who have shown interest in ‘iron deficiency’ may be useful. Targeting against this correlational audience in Facebook exposes your campaign to upwards of 200,000 users in North America who you may not have reached otherwise, and who may end up being interested in health supplements!

Audience targeting facebook

Correlational Audiences: A Live Example

To further illuminate this concept, let’s look at some data! Our internal team of performance marketing experts ran extensive tests to see how this theory performs in action.

The client in question was in the beauty and fragrance sector. Our team created audiences in the beauty category that would most closely match the offering. Concurrently, they created correlated audiences focused around frequent travelers, users interested in public events, and users with recent or upcoming anniversaries to name a few.

Audience targeting facebook

As shown in the chart above, the correlated audiences yielded slightly higher cost per acquisitions (CPA/CPL), though they also delivered over 3x as many conversions!

Take Control of your Media Spend

It’s time to take control of your marketing spend. If you’re interested in launching highly converting performance-based campaigns, look no further! Our team of experts have implemented correlational audiences and a variety of advanced media buying tactics across verticals/industries with success. Together, we can help you think out of the box with your audience targeting which can deliver more conversions for your business!

If you are interested in taking your performance to the next level, let’s chat. We’re here to help!

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