Digital marketing has made it exponentially easier for brands to reach the audiences of their choice. Once confined to traditional advertising formats, even the smallest businesses and brands can now reach out to large audiences and custom-tailor every aspect of the experience. Whether it be via search, on social media or even via email, these digital marketing options make building any campaign phenomenally flexible.

With PPC marketing in particular, knowing your options can make a huge difference. To illustrate the broader options available to those who are considering PPC campaigns, let’s look at which targeting options are among the most popular selections.

Search Targeting

Arguably the most popular type of targeting in PPC marketing, search targeting lets brands and businesses focus on specific search niches. Most commonly used on sites such as Google, users bid on specific keywords. The end result is that their ads are shown (based on how much they’re paying per click) as often as possible to those who are conducting searches for the keywords in question. By pinging search engines using this method, brands can reach everybody who performs a search for specific terms.

Demographic Targeting

Another popular format on many platforms that allow PPC ads is the notion of demographic targeting. As it sounds, demographic targeting lets users target specific audiences based on interests or characteristics. Some platforms allow brands to target those of a specific age, gender or race, while others may offer options to target individuals based on their past habits or interactions (such as with specific social media pages). This method is useful if you believe your best target audience is rooted within specific socioeconomic or interest-based characteristics.

Audience Targeting

Some platforms let you create custom audiences based on a combination of the above-mentioned factors. These can then be saved and used to target your custom audiences when necessary. By using audience targeting, you can combine a variety of elements – such as age, income, interests and keyword usage – to produce a more effective, balanced target. While this can be useful in many ways, not every brand will find that audience targeting is the most effective strategy in PPC.

Remarketing

One final form of PPC campaign marketing revolves around targeting those who have already expressed interest in your brand. In many cases, these users may have visited your site but never returned. In other cases, they may have abandoned shopping carts. Whatever the reason, remarketing allows you to push ads specifically to these people, thanks to a little piece of code known as a pixel.

Through the use of pixels and cookies, brands can track down those who have recently visited or engaged with the brand, promote new and custom ads at them, and reclaim a sizeable portion of what would otherwise be lost business or traffic.

Whether you’re pinging search engines or social media, PPC campaigns offer a plethora of flexible options to reach your ideal audience. Whether you’re focused on bringing back lost traffic, creating custom audiences, reaching out to specific demographics or targeting precise search terms, the effectiveness of any PPC campaign is only limited by the quality of the effort on the brand’s behalf.