While advertising rules and trends may change, one fact remains constant.
Personalizing advertising campaigns is where success lies. Providing fully personalized experiences to every audience segment in the advertising funnel gets you conversions, and eventually, a high return on ad spend (ROAS).
Personalization isn’t a new phenomenon, it has been used in the pre-click stage for years—from dynamically inserting names into emails to programmatic advertising. However, advertisers still aren’t using personalization in campaigns to the strategy’s full potential, specifically in the post-click stage.
Let’s change that.
Enter Google and Facebook.
How Google and Facebook can help with personalization
Facebook and Google are powerful advertising platforms designed around personalization.
Both advertising giants gather data about their users and show them content based on their actions and preferences. Information learned by the platforms is used for data models that progressively make advertisers’ campaigns “smarter.”
Advertisers can learn a lot about personalization from looking at Google and Facebook. In this blog post, we’ll examine some of the personalization practices used by these two advertising platforms—and how to implement them in your own ad campaigns.
Google personalized search
Google introduced personalized search in 2004. The primary purpose of personalized search is to increase the relevance of the results for a particular user. Arguably, this is where the trend towards online personalization, browser cookies, and search engine optimization (SEO) truly began.
The Google search results a user sees aren’t just based on the traditional ranking factors—such as the relevance of the web pages to the search term or their authority—they are also sorted based on the information that Google has collected about the user with browser cookies. The information includes the user’s location, search and browser history, device, other Google products they use, demographics, and interests.
Google shows users what the platform expects they’re searching for, based on what they’ve searched for in the past. Since Google owns 92% of the search engine market worldwide, audiences have grown used to this kind of online experience over time, signifying personalization is not a marketing fad, but it is here to stay.
Advertisers now need to segment and personalize experiences based on users’ demographics, interests, and devices to create an enjoyable user experience and a smooth transition from the initial ad click to the post-click experience.