Data Analytics

How Brands are Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Customer Segmentation

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Accurate customer segmentation is of primary importance for an effective marketing campaign. Segmenting is a key element to lead generation because it enables brands to divide prospects into groups with similar characteristics and then develop targeted content for each segmented audience. This is important because it means messaging is more relevant to the recipients, which leads to better response rates.

Typically, marketing teams will segment based on a few simple marketer-defined segments like income and location. This is a missed opportunity because the segment is too large, and likely there will be a large number of recipients in the group who are not responsive to your targeted message due to its broadness. This can lead to lower conversion rates, higher customer churn, and poor customer satisfaction. 

AI-based machine learning models present an opportunity to improve marketing segmentation by looking at a much broader variety of data – like browsing history, prior purchases, demographics, and household data from third parties. Brands can gain more meaningful insights into customer behavior, allowing them to target their marketing campaigns effectively. Plus, brands can have an unlimited number and size of segments. This advanced targeting allows analysis of large amounts of customer data to foster personalized customer experience. This approach yields higher conversion rates and higher revenues, which has led to a growing number of businesses adopting AI machine learning for customer segmentation.

Brands looking to improve their marketing efforts and drive revenue growth cannot ignore the effectiveness of AI-driven customer segmentation. Maximum efficiency and greater ROI are achieved with AI along with the ability to: 

Precisely Identify Customer Segments – Analyzing data from various sources, AI can hyper-target the right customer at the right time, identifying customer preferences and segmenting into meaningful groups. AI can also track each customer’s buying journey so brands can understand their customers better, create more engaging content, and drive revenue.

Create Engaging Content – Through analyzing customer data, AI can identify the content that is most likely to appeal to a specific customer segment, increasing customer engagement. AI can find hidden patterns in data that a human marketer may be unable to spot, enabling brands to act on this new data.

Identify and Track Leads – AI can help track leads and leverage new leads from existing client networks. Brands can analyze previous interactions with a specific lead to predict what products or services they’ll be most interested in. 

Measure the Success of Campaigns – AI-driven insights indicate how customer segments respond to specific messages and promotions. Even more, AI can continuously monitor customer behavior to identify changes so brands know when they need to adjust their strategies to maximize efficiency and ROI.

AI-driven customer segmentation is an invaluable tool to help brands improve marketing efforts and drive revenue growth. As brands increasingly look to digital channels for engagement, AI-driven customer segmentation is being viewed as the premier option for creating better customer experiences. With its ability to provide real-time insights into customer behavior and tailor campaigns accordingly, AI-based segmentation helps brands create more engaging content that resonates with their target audience exactly where they are in the buying journey and drives sales.

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The Role of AI in Your Lead Gen Strategy

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Digitization has transformed lead generation. No longer limited to traditional approaches of in-person events and painful cold calling, businesses are now using omnichannel outreach via e-mails, websites, apps, and social media to reach highly targeted customers who are ready to buy. 

With the addition of more communication channels, sales cycles are now longer and more complex, adding to the marketing and sales workload. In addition, despite best efforts, HubSpot reports nearly 79 percent of leads never convert. So, it’s no wonder more than 40 percent of salespeople and 60 percent of marketers report they see lead generation as a major pain point. Enter AI. AI is the perfect tool to improve lead generation and lead nurturing. 

Businesses are increasingly leveraging AI-powered tools for lead generation in their sales and marketing operations. These tools automate the once mundane and/or time consuming tasks of finding and qualifying leads, creating customer profiles, personalizing content, and nurturing leads. For example, through the use of AI platforms and other algorithms that collect and analyze data like sales and the performance of different marketing strategies, CRMs can function at a much higher level with business insights that improve sales and ROI with enhanced intel that aids customer management. According to reporting at Cience:

  • Enterprises that used AI-enabled lead-generation tools saw a 15% to 20% increase in sales productivity and 20% in order management throughput.
  • More than 40% of sales leaders using AI tools have seen major improvements in their lead prioritization, use of their salespersons’ time, and understanding of customer needs. 
  • About 84% of business executives believe AI can give them a competitive edge. 

Here are some of the ways using AI as part of a comprehensive lead generation strategy can help a business grow.

1. Make Better Predictions

Using AI learning helps marketers make informed predictions by providing insight on the data collected and determining patterns in behavior. 

2. Develop Lookalike Audiences

AI and machine learning enable marketers to identify and target audiences that are the best fit.

3. Gather And Analyze Sales Data

AI can extract intelligence from huge market research data sets, but that’s not all it can do. Using the data in your CRM and other data warehouses, AI examines profiles of customers, transactional data, and behavior data to provide invaluable insights.

4. Make Real-Time Decisions

AI can take real-time data from your CRM and other data warehouses like Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms to help with lead scoring to determine your ideal customer, where they are in their journey, and the targeted message you should put in front of them. 

5. Create Targeted Lists

AI can be used to help create targeted lists such as a contact database grouped by industry, companies, and other factors with real-time updates. AI can then be used to manage updates, ensuring the data is always current. It also works well for creating e-mail lists and then tracking clicks, open rates, and other engagement.

6. Create Content

Content creation can be greatly assisted by AI, using it to generate subject lines, messaging, and design. However, there are still some hiccups with this. For more on this topic, read this article.  

Now is an exciting time to take advantage of AI technology to improve your lead generation. There is no denying its ability to help marketers gain greater insights that can be used to target and nurture leads through their journey all the way to the end of the funnel and increase sales.  

Your Guide to the New ChatGPT

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In November 2022 the artificial intelligence startup OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a viral online large language machine that has the tech world and marketers giddy with excitement…and full of questions. ChatGPT was free to use, but now there is a fee, a necessity to triage capacity issues brought on by the free access that drove huge user numbers. 

It seems everyone has an opinion about ChatGPT. Engineers and  entrepreneurs tout it as a welcomed new frontier. It’s predicted to fuel new products, services and solutions, but not everyone is on the bandwagon. Social scientists and journalists are worried because they see the potential this technology may have to wreak havoc. Don’t worry. According to experts a full AI takeover isn’t imminent. ChatGPT doesn’t speak with sentience and doesn’t “think” like a human. There is an intrinsic difference between how humans produce language versus large language models. 

What puts this chatbot in the spotlight is how close it gets to replicating human-like language abilities thanks to generative AI, which uses statistics, reinforcement learning, and supervised learning to index words, phrases, and sentences. It’s a revolutionary technology that has been trained to learn what humans mean when they ask a question. It can also produce essays, solve coding problems, provide customer service, translate, and more. This is possible because it’s powered by large amounts of data and billions of words scraped from the web and other sources along with computing techniques to mimic writing styles, avoid certain types of conversations, and learn from questions. ChatGPT can access a vast vocabulary and database of information and understand words in context, helping it mimic human speech patterns to dispatch its encyclopedic knowledge. 

OpenAI is not alone in its use of large language model tools. Other well-known tech companies like Google and Meta use the large language model tools to develop programs that respond to human prompts and devise sophisticated responses. 

The technology is spreading to virtually every field – health care, marketing, law, you name it. But, it’s not a magic bullet. Open AI has acknowledged as much, sharing on its website that “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.”  As with any technology, there are deficiencies and limitations. Here are a few in the spotlight now:

Plagiarism and Cheating

Plagiarism and student cheating are a valid concern. Thankfully, there is software that can be used to detect OpenAI text. However, due to the learning nature of the AI chatbot, it will keep learning and getting smarter, which may make it harder to identify plagiarism using the prescribed software.

Racism, Sexism, and Bias

ChatGPT fell under scrutiny when racial and gender biases were associated with the chatbot. Implicit bias built into technology is not a new discovery. UC Berkeley psychology and neuroscience professor Steven Piantadosi stated on Twitter in early December 2022 his concerns, “No, OpenAI has not come close to addressing the problem of bias. Filters appear to be bypassed with simple tricks, and superficially masked. And what is lurking inside is egregious.” He used queries based on race and gender, and ChatGPT produced results that favored white males over women and people of color.

Inaccurate Information

Despite the ongoing hype over ChatGPT, it also has ongoing issues with accuracy that have been well-documented since its inception. OpenAI has conceded that its chatbot possesses “limited knowledge of world events after 2021.” If there is insufficient data on a particular subject, the chatbot gives replies that contain incorrect data. This has started a much-needed discourse on the use of AI as a reliable source to create content – especially among news sources.

Clearly, some refined, deep content is necessary to address this problem. While it’s one thing for the chatbot to work “just ok” to relieve writer’s block, let’s say, this level of performance isn’t acceptable when using the chatbot to source valid, deep, and expansive domain data. If the information programmed is inherently flawed and the algorithms aren’t constantly regulating for reliability, then this new technology is just a big disinformation machine. Other issues with inaccuracies include:

Phrasing Sensitivity – ChatGPT is sensitive to tweaks to input phrasing or multiple attempts with the same prompt. It can claim to not know an answer, but when rephrased can answer the questions correctly.

Excessively Verbose – The model can be unnecessarily wordy, overusing certain phrases and being repetitive due to biases in the training data that favor long answers that are believed to be more comprehensive.

Inaccurate Guessing – Ambiguous queries should be questioned;  however, the current models usually guess at the user’s intention.

In the tech world, more data is always better. That philosophy is at play here as well, with OpenAI suggesting the system will “learn” from invalid data as long as the data set gets bigger. Fixing issues with inaccuracies is a challenging assignment that will garner more attention as the technology matures.

Not Original Content

A limitation is if more than one user asks the chatbot to write on the same topic, everyone making that request will get the same response. Therefore, the content created isn’t unique or original – all users will end up with the same copy. Thus, personalization is an area that still requires a lot of development.

No Mobile App

Currently, ChatGPT is strictly a browser-based platform with no mobile app feature available as of yet; however, I’m certain one is coming, but there has been no confirmation of this by the brand. This lack of cross platform availability has given rise to copycat apps charging exorbitant prices. Beware of ChatGPT fakes not associated with or supported by OpenAI. A popular workaround for this is to load the chatbot on your smartphone browser. 

Looking to the Future

As with most new technologies, pioneers usually take most of the heat for early misses. However, the market will grow and advance, fueled by eager VC firm funding. Financial investors predict ChatGPT will spawn new companies and products moving forward. Some also foresee a new form of Internet search coming from this technology.

Competition is certainly on the way, as all of the players will enter the ring, perhaps introducing industry-specific and domain-specific offerings, new products, and other creative solutions. Just yesterday OpenAI announced version three of ChatGPT is out, unveiling “an entirely new user interface” complete with:

  • Five new creative sizes for those who do display or programmatic ads
  • A new version of AI that can generate more and better creatives even faster 
  • An OpenAI-supported startup with  several copywriting methodologies

The opportunities this technology presents is staggering. Rather than replacing vast amounts of workers, the technology will be used to enhance and upgrade the systems we use to do our work so we can do that work more effectively and efficiently.

Why is AI So Important for B2B Lead Generation?

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No matter the vertical you are in, customer experience is paramount. Today’s B2B consumer cares nearly as much about the service they get from a business as they do about the product or service they are buying. The expectations are set for a fully personalized experience at all online touch points – including your lead generation website.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help companies create the experience leads and prospects want and expect. More and more marketers are utilizing the power of AI to sell, and the trend is just beginning. According to data from Salesforce, the use of AI in marketing has skyrocketed from just 29% in 2018 to a staggering 84% in 2020. Here’s a look at how AI is being used to drive and close leads:

1. Access Massive Datasets 24/7

We all know that lead scoring is a tedious and time-consuming process, but it is a necessary evil. AI enables marketers to access massive datasets 24/7, looking at the most important factors and every detail that marketers just don’t have time to do on their own. And, AI does a better job, picking up on finer details that an overworked marketing professional cannot. AI scoring is far more accurate, enabling marketers to use the data to target leads much better.

Even better, AI only improves with time due to machine learning that studies computer algorithms and makes improvements automatically through experience and data analysis.

2. Reduce Bounce and Increase Engagement

This is marketers sore spot: bounce rates. All marketers want a low bounce rate because it’s an indication of interest in your content, your products, and your brand. A high bounce rate indicates low interest, which isn’t something anyone in marketing and sales wants to see.

The best way to mitigate a high bounce rate is to take measures to increase engagement. We know that the longer a prospect stays on your website, the more likely they are to convert to a lead and self-nurture. Keep in mind, the average buyer consumes at least 13 pieces of content from a single site before making a decision. Self-nurturing websites let prospects binge relevant content until they’re ready to provide their e-mail address and other information.

We also know that in order to get a lead to provide contact information, takes work, even when the content on our site is compelling. AI uses your content to create an engaging customer experience using multiple algorithms to study the behavior of each prospect that visits your site. AI then provides personalized content recommendations to let prospects do their own research while being guided down the sales funnel – all without having to fill out a form or talk to a salesperson yet. AI streamlines the sales process, encouraging prospects to stay on your site longer and to learn more about the opportunity, consuming more content with each subsequent visit to your site. 

3. Make Better Insights

Most marketers are in the fortunate position of having lots of data on prospects. However, it takes time and know-how to properly sort through that mountain of information. AI gathers and analyzes all of that data and draws better insight than any marketer could working alone.

4. Create Adaptive Content Hubs

Most blogs require visitors to scroll through an organized list of blog posts based on categories you have selected in order to access the content they want. AI enables you to organize your blogs by any vertical or pain point you choose. Once a prospect starts browsing your blog, your algorithms study the prospect’s behavior and provide personalized selections from your blog content.

5. Collect Accurate Data

It takes a good strategy to segment prospects, score leads, and develop content. But all that work can go down the drain if you are not collecting high-quality data. When your data is incomplete or incorrect, it throws a wrench in your marketing efforts. AI is your security that you are collecting accurate, usable data from the get-go, right when the lead enters your system. It does this by scanning public sources to verify company, job title, and other contact information. 

Adding an AI engine to your site puts you in a prime position to benefit from high-level personalization for your lead gen. AI also assists you with the task of nurturing your leads. Implementing tech-driven tools like adaptive content hubs and self-nurturing landing pages help ensure your content is working hard and smart for you.

4 Ways to Improve the Performance of Your Website

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Is your website underperforming and if it is, what can you do about it? To help determine the performance of your website, start by establishing the following benchmarks:

  1. What is my site’s domain authority?

Do Google and the other search engines see your site?  Are your pages properly indexed and optimized?  Domain authority helps indicate how well your site performs in a search engine. This tool provides your site with a score between 0-100.   There are several online tools that will look at your site and provide you with this score. Let us know if you need help with this, and we will happily assist you with providing your site with its domain authority.

  1. Where is the traffic to my website coming from?

Google Analytics provides you a tool that will show you where the traffic is coming from.  Generally categorized as free and paid traffic, Google separates traffic by referral (coming from other sites), direct (paid traffic), organic (free search), and social (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter).

  1. What is the net traffic to my website?

Google Analytics provides the number of visitors to your site.  Calculating the number of net visitors is the number of visitors subtracted by the back rate or bounce rate.  The back rate is the number of visitors who leave immediately after they visit the site.  The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

  1. What is my site’s conversion rate?

Conversion rate represents the percentage of visitors who complete your desired action.  That could be filling out a form, purchasing a product, or calling a telephone number.  Simply, conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the net number of visitors to your website.

Establishing these benchmarks is important to setting goals that will help improve the performance of your website.  And, the beauty of website performance improvement is that you can increase revenue without increasing advertising spend!

Our white paper How To Improve Your Website For More Leads and Profit is full of additional ways to turn your website into a powerful lead generator. To request your free copy, click here.

Have you had success turning your underperforming website around? If so, tell us how you did it.

Trends in Digital Marketing for 2019

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The new year is all about connectivity, and those who embrace it will thrive in the increasingly more digital world. Here are some opportunities I think will be leading the way in 2019.

 

Connected TV Will Continue Its Rise

Connected TV (CTV) found its momentum in 2018 with viewership steadily increasing and projected to reach 190 million users in 2019 while traditional cable continues to decline. According to Extreme Reach, the growth of CTV doubled in 2018 versus the previous year. And, it overtook mobile, which accounted for 30 percent of video ad impressions. CTV enables televisions to connect to the Internet, opening up a world of content not before available through traditional TV viewing. This translates into unparalleled reach and better targeting for marketers.

Instagram TV Will Take On YouTube

In 2018 Instagram set out to disrupt the video market by launching its own YouTube competitor called Instagram TV (IGTV). In the past, Instagram stories were only viewable for 24 hours, and videos could only be one minute. With IGTV, this is no longer the case, and marketers and Instagram users are taking notice. Marketers are seeing the potential IGTV brings to engage with prospects in a meaningful and highly targeted way. Video content is still a powerful tool in 2019.

Artificial Intelligence Will Become More Pervasive

Marketers can’t beat the enhanced analytics AI provides, so it’s no wonder more and more marketers are using AI to plan and execute their campaigns. According to Salesforce, 51 percent of marketing leaders are already using AI in some form, and more than a quarter will begin using AI technology in 2019. With increased usage, we can expect to see improvements in this technology over time. Chatbots are a great example. Powered by AI automation, bots are reshaping the way customers interact with brands and shape the customer experience by answering queries and providing online assistance.

Augmented Reality Advertising Will Get Real

One of the most prevalent obstacles of online shopping is customers can’t personally engage with the product by touching it, trying it on, etc. Augmented reality (AR) technology solves this problem. Furniture brands like IKEA use AR so online shoppers can visualize what the furniture will look like in their homes, and makeup chains such as Sephora enable online shoppers to test products on themselves using an uploaded selfie. Consumers are opting to buy online now more than ever, so AR is going to become increasingly more important and more sophisticated.

Voice Advertising Will Enhance Customization

Currently, millions of people use voice devices to ask for information, make a phone call, text, or easily place orders — and advertisers are starting to take notice. According to Com Score, an estimated 50 percent of all searches will be conducted through voice by 2020. You can see the opportunity this technology provides to develop creative voice campaigns that use jingles or recognizable influencer voices targeted to your prospects. And, unlike text queries, which tend to be short, voice-activated searches provide marketers with greater context to more effectively tailor the message to the target audience’s needs and preferences.

Be On The Look Out For Visual Searches

This technology is just beginning to take off. A visual search enables a consumer to take a photo of a desired product with their smartphone and then locate the item (or one similar to it) in a store. Home Depot and Urban Outfitters are just two examples of brands using this technology. And, platforms like Pinterest, Bing and Google have rolled out search functions that enable users to locate items inspired by objects in the real world.

I am excited by these technologies and the possibilities they offer marketers in 2019. Don’t be afraid to try something new and take full advantage of all of the new ways we have to reach prospects. Happy New Year!

 

Do You Do These 5 Things Successful Retailers Do?

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greatest_bannersIllustration: KrizzDaPaul/GettyImagesWhile online sales continue to take on retail, the most successful retailers have discovered that the secret to success is to prioritize what it is your customers truly want, invest in the technology and people to deliver it, and make the experience seamless across channels. Before I talk about the five ways they do this, I want to share recent Custora research that gives insight into what’s driving retail growth.

Average Order Frequency Beats Customer Acquisition

Yes, you read that right. High-growth brands invest significantly in acquiring new customers, but it’s relatively inefficient.

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Savvy retailers have responded, instead investing their dollars in things like welcome series, hybrid subscription models, and personalization across channels and devices to drive brand engagement and product discovery.

Increasing Average Order Size Increases Revenue

Another powerful finding from Custora is that increasing basket size is more beneficial than just trying for repeat business.  The most successful data-driven retailers excel at cross-selling by suggesting complementary products the customer may like or upselling by showing the customer premium merchandise and full-price new arrivals.

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But, most retailers will tell you that growing basket size is more difficult than driving repeat business. They are right – unless they are doing these five things.

The 5 Steps to Retail Success

  1. Analyze Your Customer Data: You gather lots of data on your customers. Take a look at it and see what it’s telling you about your customers’ relationship to your brand.
  2. Create A Plan: Are you going to try to cross-sell or upsell? Determine that objective and then set goals. In general, cross-selling is a good starting approach for retailers of relatively low price-point goods, impulse purchases, or a wide merchandise assortment. Retailers of homogeneous or high-consideration goods might instead focus on upselling.
  3. Look At Your Sales: Now it’s time to study your sales and see what that data tells you. What products are typically purchased together? Which customer type tends to buy premium products? Knowing this information is invaluable.
  4. Start Small: The most successful retailers keep it simple when they are just beginning. So, begin with just one offer and measure its impacts and adjust accordingly, then expand from there.
  5. Optimize And Automate: Once you have identified what works, keep your momentum going by continuing to monitor your data and tweaking your approach in response to what your data is telling you.

By implementing these five steps, retailers unlock untapped opportunity and increase their ability to grow and thrive – even in the digital age.

 

Demographics Don’t Gauge Your Target Market’s Mood – Why That Matters

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Unknown-1In a climate ripe with data gathering and advanced analytics, the mood of our prospects isn’t often considered. We’ve come so far since the early days of advertising, yet in many ways we still rely on the yesteryear approach to marketing. Think about how we price advertising, which is archaic when you consider it’s best to buy ads one at a time based on analytic analysis. Equally outdated is the basic premise of demographics – a practice that begun in the 1920s – and it’s enduring focus on greater segmentation and third-party data collection with disregard to how we consume media in today’s economy.

In all of our advances, we seem to have missed the boat. Social media is the closest we’ve come to hitting the mark. Only in that arena do we realize that we have the means to speak to our prospects in real time. But, that’s where we tend to stop. We don’t acknowledge that that means we can advertise to prospects frequently, optimizing campaigns around prospects’ given moods.

If You Want a Personal Connection With Prospects, You Can’t Discount Mood

Much (if not all) of our segmenting is hard fact centered; we never consider mood. Yet, we increasingly want to use our technological advances to make a more meaningful, personal connection. It seems counterintuitive, and I’m not alone in this thinking.

We should be putting more emphasis on prospects’ given mood and optimizing from that vantage point. Media buys would then be adjusted to the content that speaks to the prospects’ moods, using real-time reactions. Traditional, long-held demographic segmenting practices alone will not get us where we want to go. We have to dig deeper and consider the moods of our prospects to reach them in a meaningful way.

Why You Should Use HTML for Your Marketing E-Mails

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There was once a time when there was a valid concern regarding the deliverability of HTML e-mails, but that is no longer the case. So if you aren’t using HTML for your marketing e-mails, you should. Here’s why.

1. HTML Drives More Leads

With HTML you can build in interactive hyperlinks and calls to action that take your content to the next level, generating more leads and sales conversions than plain text ever could.

  1. HTML Is Responsive

Another advantage of using HTML is the fact you can offer an unsubscribe option. This gives your prospects the opportunity to opt out of future e-mails from you, so your list is comprised of only the best, most qualified leads who want to hear from you.

HTML also gives you the huge advantage of gathering analytics, seeing who engaged and how. This enables you to track and measure audience engagement and refines your e-mail marketing strategy based on what you find out.

  1. HTML Design Isn’t Busy

Often marketers worry HTML e-mails will be too busy. Not true. You can make HTML e-mails just as clean as plain text e-mail but with all of the added benefits HTML offers. In fact, HTML provides the perfect balance between effectively branding your company and controlling the content message, ensuring the content is the focus of the e-mail.

  1. Even HTML Design Must Follow Best Practices

When using HTML, you still have to follow best practices. Keep your design clean, your copy short, and your call to action prominent. Take advantage of analytics and test subject lines and offers to see what works best to get your prospects’ attention. Remember though to only test one thing at a time or you won’t know what impacted the results you see. Most importantly, always, always use a good e-mail list!

HTML is really the only way to go when it comes to sending your marketing e-mails, so don’t be afraid to use it. You won’t regret it!

 

Three Ways to Optimize Your Display Ads

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Display ads can be a great way to increase your brand exposure and build awareness. But if you’ve ever run a display ad, you know that getting qualified prospects to click can be challenging. Luckily, I’ve found some ways to help. By using data analytics, you can make sure your ads are running in the right place at the right time, hopefully generating more clicks from better prospects. Here are three easy ways to do that.

  1. Audit Your AdWords Placements

The name of the game with display advertising is impressions. Google wants you to get the most impressions possible because that’s how they get paid. Google isn’t concerned with the quality or relevancy of those impressions. You need to be. You can’t just pick a topic or interest to target (like marketing) and call it a day. Your ad is likely to end up on all sorts of sites – many of which you won’t think are a good match.

Not every website on the Internet that matches the Google “marketing” definition will necessarily be a match for your company. The best way to figure out where your ads are being displayed, what’s working and what’s not is to audit your display ad placements. To do this you just open your display ad in AdWords, click on the Display Network tab, and then click Placements. You’ll see where your ad(s) were displayed, the number of impressions and clicks, conversions, etc., for each site your ad was displayed on. You will quickly be able to determine which sites are worth your ad dollars and which ones aren’t and proceed accordingly.

  1. Identify the Best Keywords

We have a similar situation here with keyword contextual targeting. When you determine your keywords, you have to remember that not every site Google selects using your keywords will be relevant. (The audit you do in step one above will shed some light on your keywords too.)

The best way to find the best keywords is to listen to how your prospects talk about your business segment. You can do this by opening one of your relevant paid search campaigns in AdWords, click on Keywords, and then Search Terms. You’ll see the exact searches that triggered your ad and the results they achieved.

Once you know these top-performing keywords and phrases, you can use them to build your contextual targeting keyword strategy.

  1. Look at Demographics

Demographic targeting can help improve the performance of your display ad(s). To see the demographics of the visitors to your site, open Google Analytics, click on Audience, then Demographics, then Overview, and then select Converters. If you have enough traffic to your site, you’ll see great demographics information you can use. If your site traffic isn’t stellar, you can run a similar report using the AdWords Report Editor in Google Analytics.

As with all other marketing tactics, the success or failure of your strategy is largely reliant on how well you use your data to guide your decisions. Pay attention and respond to what your data is telling you, and your display ads and all of your other marketing initiatives will perform better.