What is Ad Targeting?

Ad targeting is a technique in app user acquisition. Its purpose is to increase the chance to find users that match the criteria of a predefined target audience. These criteria can be demographics, interests, or behavior.

Why Ad Targeting is Important

Targeted ads are more relevant for users than non-targeted ads. Thus, users’ likeliness to interact with an ad and install the promoted app is higher.

As a result, targeted ad campaigns create better conversion rates, higher post-install engagement, more purchases, and higher revenues.

In conclusion, ad targeting makes user acquisition campaigns more effective and more efficient.

Demographical Targeting

Targeting mobile users based on demographics is difficult because users are anonymous. Therefore it is technically challenging to identify someone’s demographics beyond a doubt. Nevertheless, it is possible to increase the chance of finding users that match predefined demographics by excluding traffic sources that are unlikely to deliver the right users.

Here are some demographics are interesting in terms of targeting:

• gender
• age
• nationality
• education
• profession
• income
• marital status

Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is an essential concept in the mobile ad industry, and most of the big networks use tracking software that analyzes users’ behavior, for example:

• which websites they visit
• which type of content they consume (blogs, news articles, music, videos, etc.)
• which apps they use
• which products they buy

This data is used to define the interests, hobbies, and other behavioral characteristics of users. Based on these findings, algorithms can predict which ads might be interesting for them and which not.