When to start with web traffic campaigns

When your business isn’t growing as fast as you want it to, your first instinct might be to run a sales or conversion campaign.

However, conversion campaigns are best suited for customers who are at the end of their buyer journey. This means that a customer is already are aware of your brand and is ready to buy after considering your products.

If you need to grow your business fast, you need to find prospects who will be immediately interested in you. You might not have the time, budget, or resources to create large and impactful brand awareness campaigns like a big company.

Instead, you can tap into new people who are already considering a purchase in your category of products or services.
How do you find new audiences who’ll be interested in your brand?
When you need to grow your business quickly, finding new and relevant audiences is crucial. This is when to run a campaign that focuses on increasing your traffic.

In digital advertising, web traffic campaigns allow you to reach potential consumers as they go about their digital lives and drive them to your website.

Traffic-focused ads reinforce your brand and help get consumers closer to making a purchase. A customer browsing for watches might still be in the middle of making his decision to buy.

Check out examples of awareness, consideration, and conversion ads in our gallery.

Your web traffic ads will show him the styles he's most interested in and encourage him to visit your website to see more colors and similar styles.

A week later, he's seen enough options, has enough information, and decides to complete his purchase with you. Without your online ads, he could have purchased watches from a competitor.

Below, we’ll go over a few steps on how to run your own successful web traffic campaign.

Define your audience
Look at the customers who buy from you and are the most loyal. Who are they? What are their preferences? With this information, you can build a list of prospects that you can target to help grow your business.

With Criteo, web traffic campaigns can include:

Similar Audiences: Find new users who have never visited your website, but who look like your current visitors
Commerce Audiences: Find new users who have never visited your website, but belong to Criteo’s pre-built segments based on demographics, in-market product, and brand data
Contact Lists: Re-engage with existing users who haven’t returned to your site for quite some time
Custom Audiences: Create custom combinations of your audience using your first-party data and Criteo’s data. These combinations create rich customer profiles that better represent your target audience.

Focus on what they need to get from consideration to conversion. After all, these are the customers that will drive the growth of your business.

Criteo can help you better understand which segments you should target for your web traffic campaign with the Audience Explorer dashboard. This dashboard will allow you to see which segments provided by Criteo have the highest affinity with your existing customer base, and will guide you on the segments that you can focus on to drive more interest in your brand.

Personalize your ads
We asked 1,000 U.S. customers how they feel about digital ads in Criteo’s "Why We Buy" survey. Almost half of them like ads that help them discover new products and 37% like ads that remind them of products they’re interested in.

At the same time, 46% of shoppers don’t like it when online ads show them products that they’re not interested in. Another 24% dislike ads that show them products they’ve already purchased.

This might seem like a lot to manage: How can you personalize ads for every customer and keep them all from having a negative experience with your ads? It’s all in the data.

Today’s advertising technology makes it easy to use your own eCommerce shop to customize every ad for every customer.

Criteo’s dynamic ads mean that each ad is personalized for each user, even those that have never engaged with your website before, displaying the products or services that they’re most likely to be interested in.

Using the Criteo Shopper Graph and Criteo AI Engine, each ad is shown at exactly the right time – when your target user is most likely to click.
Narrow down what works for your brand
It’s smart to experiment with your digital advertising, but don’t miss the most important step: analyze what worked and what didn’t.

When your campaigns are over, break them down and get as granular as you can. And never stop analyzing and learning from your own campaigns.

Where to start? A great place is Criteo’s Audience Explorer, which you can use to:

Discover which segments you can target today to drive more interest in your brand
Define your audience by using available Commerce Audiences
Create engaging and interactive ads (See product recommendations even for prospects! Use interactive formats to engage with prospects who don't know about you. Focus on a mix of branding and product elements for people in the consideration mindset)
Find out which audience segments have performed better than others with the Audience Performance report
Refine your target audience for your future campaigns

Also, don’t forget about re-engaging with your lapsed users. You can upload a list of offline sales data, from your CDP or DMP, or define a set of website visitors such as those who haven't purchased for the past three months.