Top DV360 Targeting Tactics You Should Try

Google’s Display & Video 360 (DV360) offers a comprehensive set of targeting opportunities, including Google’s owned data for audiences, auction packages and third-party consumer data and publisher deals. Deciding which targeting tactics are most impactful can be overwhelming. Here are some we recommend, in priority order:

First-Party Opportunities for Targeting or Suppression (Tier One Tactics)

First-party data is the strongest indicator of your qualified audience— and it’s customizable. DV360 integrates with the Google Marketing Platform (GMP) and top data onboarders to easily bring your first-party audiences to life. Employ all of the audience opportunities below first before moving on to other strategies.

CM360 FLOODLIGHTS

• Homepage Visitors
• Cart Abandoners
• Thank You Pages
• Form Fill Buttons

CRM UPLOADS

• Customer Match List Upload
• LiveRamp Onboarding

GA360 AUDIENCES

• New Users
• Visit Duration Behaviors
• Site Section Users
• Smart Lists

SEARCH AUDIENCES

• Keyword Clickers
• Social Audiences
• Tag-Based and Rule-Based Google Ads Lists

ADS DATA HUB

• Offline Data Joins to First-Party Data
• Customer Groups by Conversion Funnel in BigQuery

ACTIVITY-BASED AUDIENCES

• Campaign Clickers
• Campaign Converters
• Impressions (Based on first-party remarketing lists or leads to conversions)

Adjustments First-Party Data Opportunities

Here are three ways you can tweak your tactics to reach the right audiences at the right time:

Recency
Configure your targeted audience based on how recently a cookie was added to the audience list.

Targeting Expansion
Reach potential customers (even in cookieless environments) who share interest profiles with your existing customers.

Propensity Modeling
Target audiences based on their predicted behavior like propensity to convert, churn or unsubscribe using BigQuery and the Google Cloud Platform.

Try Custom Intent + Affinity

There are two types of custom list targeting: custom affinity and custom intent. These audiences are a great way to leverage Google’s immense real-time data in a way that’s customized to your brand, competition and target audience. Custom affinity segments target audiences by the online media they consume or are interested in. Custom intent reaches audiences as they are making a purchase decision related to a product or service.

Secondary DV360 Features You Should Consider Using  (Tier Two Tactics)

Auction Packages
Using the power of Google’s Authorized Buyers platform, DV360 users can use deal ID-based site lists with pre-bid filters that serve across the open marketplace of inventory. Google’s performance and targeting exchange data allows auction packages to leverage the power of efficient CPMs via Open Auction with precise inventory.

Channel Site Lists
Go beyond Google Ad Manager inventory and target a wide range of vertical or KPI-specific site lists across the whole supply-side platform (SSP) library in DV360.

Keywords
Granularly target the content that is most relevant to your brand, product or service. This free audience targeting approach uses Google search technology to determine if a keyword is relevant to the text (or video metadata) on a specific page. 

Deal IDs
Work with specific publishers to gain priority access to their inventory and valuable first-party audience data through a deal ID. This is especially helpful if you have tough KPIs, like viewability.

Google In-Market and Affinity Audiences
These evergreen audiences use Google’s real-time audience data from Google Maps, Chrome, YouTube and other Google properties to draw behavioral conclusions about consumers. 

Targeting Expansion of Google Audiences
Take Google’s evergreen audiences a step further and scale out the audience reach possibilities. Create free look-a-like audiences from Google’s In-Market and Affinity audiences.

Other DV360 Strategies to Try (Tier Three Tactics)

When you’ve tried everything above, you can explore more options:

Formats like Native, Waze and Gmail
Break free of standard display and video inventory to catch the attention of your audience through native formats, especially if they become burned out on your current creatives.

Demographics
The basic segments Google provides for gender, age, parental status and household income can help you target your audience but may also incur biases.

Third-Party Audiences
Some audience characteristics and actions cannot be targeted through first-party data or Google’s available audience set and can only be leveraged from third-party data companies. Third-party data providers use their own signals like visits tracked by your mobile phones, cookies, credit card data, online questionnaires and more to gather, analyze and develop specific audiences that could be beneficial to your brand. Given new and upcoming privacy changes, you won’t be able to rely on third-party data in the long run, but it’s something you can experiment with for now.

If you are a B2B advertiser then this becomes a tier one tactic given the niche audience.

Pro-Tip: Don’t exclude these as they increase your CPM and rarely drive enough value to offset them.

Content Categories
Similar to contextual keywords, content categories serve ads alongside relevant pages to your brand. This targeting is based on the whole page’s context as opposed to specific keywords found on the page and does not allow for topic customization.

Proximity Location Heavy Ups
Brick and mortar clients can benefit from targeting audiences in a small geographic radius around their—or their competitor’s—locations. If the distance is short, audiences may be more likely to engage.

Please note that these targeting opportunities don’t include the microtargeting parameters like dayparts, devices and viewability thresholds, or requirements like geotargeting, frequency capping and brand safety. And remember to be aware of including first-party data exclusions, like converters, which should be applied across all line items regardless of their priority.

For more Dv360 tips and tricks, contact us.