Online advertising is one of the quickest and most effective ways to generate results for your business: whether you want more clicks and traffic, increased brand awareness or want to make more sales. 

Basically, whatever results you’re looking for, advertising can help get you there; however, in order to achieve amazing results from your campaigns, you need more than just the budget you need to run these campaigns – you need to target the right people, on the right channels and using the right content and strategy. 

If you haven’t run many online advertising campaigns in the past, it’s tempting to think that just because you’re putting a lot of money into it and created some great content, then that means you’ll get the results you want. 

But the actual truth is that you need to be highly specific with your targeting in order to be truly successful. 

And if you’re targeting the right people and on the right platforms… well, the results will speak for themselves. Plus, you’ll spend less money on your campaigns and generate better results at the same time. 

So how do you find out where and how to target your audience? 

The answer: with lots and lots of data. 

And I’ll show you exactly how to get it:

How to get your very own advertising targeting pack:

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to try out Audiense – undoubtedly, the most powerful consumer segmentation platform in the industry (by the way, you can check out and read my full review of Audiense here).

If you’re not familiar with the tool – or haven’t read my review of it yet – Audiense is an audience intelligence tool that helps you identify relevant audiences and generates extremely detailed reports for the different segments of your audience. 

These consumer segment reports contain a ton of valuable data, including more than just the usual suspects – i.e. location and gender – but going into a lot more detail, such as their actual interests and affinities, their jobs, relationship status, education level, the media they like, the influencers they follow and so on. 

Basically, pretty much all the information that they freely put out online.

My first thought when I tried out Audiense was, quite simply…this is amazing for ads. And they know it, too – which is why they’ve created the Targeting Pack.

The way it works is pretty simple:

• You create an audience intelligence report in Audiense, based on the audiences that you want to reach 
• Once your report is ready, you’ll find all the different segments of your audience within your report – basically, Audiense creates these segments based on how those people are connected between them: who they interact with and who knows whom
• Once you’ve determined which audience segment you want to target (or even a full audience, if you prefer), you can easily download your targeting pack from the Actions menu:

• In a few minutes, you’ll receive your download directly in your inbox
• And finally, all you’ll have to do is copy and paste the data from your targeting pack directly into the targeting options of your preferred advertising platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google Ads and DSPs)

It’s very easy to set up and incredibly powerful; instead of relying on what you can think could work, you’ll have the hard, cold data that will help you achieve the results you need and want. 

First step: Create your report in Audiense

Before you can get your very own Targeting Pack, you’ll first need to create a report in Audiense. It’s very easy to do; simply click on Create New Report to get started and after you’ve named it, you’ll simply have to define your audience:

As you can see in the screenshot above, there are 3 main options: search for audiences based on their profile attributes (such as the keywords they used in their bios, their genders, job titles and so on) or based on conversations (in other words, what hashtags, keywords and URLs they used). 

And finally, if you already have an audience that you want to learn more about, you can easily upload it to Audiense directly to get all that valuable data about them (if you use social listening platforms such as Pulsar or Meltwater, you can connect them directly; otherwise, you’ll need a .txt file with at least 100 Twitter IDs).

Once your report has finished generating (it usually takes about 45 minutes), you’ll find the report in the Insights dashboard, where you can also access it:

The report is for the full audience discovered; however, you can click on See All Segments to target specific audience segments:

If you want to download the Targeting Pack, you’ll have a few different options: either download it for the full audience or focus on a specific segment. 

My recommendation? 

Focus on segments of your audience: this way, you’ll be able to create highly targeted advertising campaigns by targeting a very specific group of people. 

In my case, I focused on business owners in the US:

How to leverage the Targeting Pack data to increase your advertising ROI

When you download the Targeting Pack, you’ll notice that the data is separated into 5 different tabs:

• Cities
• Facebook and Instagram
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Google Ads and DSPs

And in the first tab, you’ll find a link to your report, information about the particular audience segment and a link to a help article in case you need any help using the targeting pack:

So, what does each tab do and how can you leverage all that data? Let’s go through each of the tabs in turn to learn more:

The Cities tab

This tab is optional, depending on whether you want to target specific locations with your campaign; if you do, all you’ll have to do is enter this data into your ads campaign manager in the location area and you’re good to go!

As you can see above, the cities are ordered by relevance so you can focus on the biggest ones first. 

Facebook and Instagram

In the Facebook and Instagram tab, you’ll find a list of all your audiences’/segment members affinities: in the first column, their names and in the second column, their descriptions. 

All you have to do to add this data is to create an Ad as normal using the Facebook Ads Manager; then, click on Create New Audience and copy in all the names from the first tab in your Targeting Pack into Facebook Detailed Targeting.

Depending on what your budget is, you might need to remove some of the names from the list and make some other small adjustments to ensure the campaign works.

You might also notice that some of the Pages are very large – for example, names like Forbes and Bill Gates; in this case, you can easily narrow down your audience by adding multiple interests so that the audience you target must also match one or several other additional interests (for example, they need to be interested in both Bill Gates and in London Business School – or any page that’s relevant to you and your target audience).

 Twitter

The Twitter tab in your Targeting Pack works just like the Facebook and Instagram one; there are 2 columns, one with your audiences’ Twitter handles and another one featuring their bio descriptions. 

And setting it all up is super easy, as Audiense features a 1-click integration with Tailored Audiences; you can easily connect your Audiense account with Twitter ads, which will send the audience directly to Twitter Ads.

Or, alternatively, you can upload the Twitter IDs directly as a tailored audience and get started:

YouTube 

Like with the other advertising networks previously, the YouTube tab in the Targeting pack features the same 2 columns: YouTube channels and descriptions for each one. 

To create an ad using this data, simply start creating your campaign and group in Google Ads Manager as normal and then copy the relevant YouTube channels you want from your Targeting Pack. 

Then, head over to Placements in your ads manager and you’ll be able to add the YouTube links from your Pack to a specific ad group for your advertising campaign.

Google Ads and DSPs

For Google Ads and DSPs, you’ll find a list of names and URLs that you can easily copy and paste as an input for your display campaign. 

To use this data, you’ll have to select Content Targeting and copy and paste the data in the Enter Multiple Placements section:

Conclusion: leveraging the Targeting Pack to increase your advertising ROI

Getting results from your advertising campaigns is not about putting as much money as you can into your ads and hoping for the best – it’s very much a science and data is an essential part of it. 

The more data you have about your target audience, the better your advertising ROI will be – and that’s exactly what the Audiense Targeting Pack helps you do. 

It provides you with highly specific targeting options and data which you can easily enter into your Ads Manager, whichever platform you might choose: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube. 

This way, your advertising campaigns will generate better results across the board, depending on what your goals are, whether it’s more clicks, more engagement, or more conversions and sales.