Target Audience
Target Audience
A target audience is the set of people an offer is meant to address, delimited by shared characteristics such as age, origin, interests or buying behaviour. The target audience definition puts those characteristics in writing before any content is produced or any advertising is booked. A typical representative of the group is often described as a persona.
| Also called | target group, audience; the individual representative is called a persona |
|---|---|
| Typical characteristics | age, gender, country of origin, language, interests, income, buying behaviour |
| When to define it | before producing content - not only when the advertising goes live |
| Consequence of the wrong audience | high bounce rate, low conversion rate, scatter loss in the advertising budget |
| Controllable on eBesucher through | interests, country, language, operating system, browser, resolution, provider |
What is a target audience?
A site operator pursues a certain goal with their website. To reach that goal they have to deal with the question of who their site offers value to. That helps in many ways: they can align the content of their website with it and book advertising deliberately.
A target audience is therefore a certain set of people who share similar interests, questions or wishes. That group of people has to be identified and can then be served by the website. The cross-section (prototype) of such a group is often called a persona. Knowing the target audience is therefore the precondition for any form of advertising that is meant to be more than scatter.
What is a target audience analysis for?
A target audience analysis should aim at a comprehensive list of all relevant characteristics of the people addressed. One important criterion here is age. The audience aged 14 to 49 is particularly receptive to information from the online world. Webmasters who do not know their audience are at a disadvantage in Google rankings. The product or service of the site is not marketed correctly and engaging visitors becomes harder. A high bounce rate is the consequence.
On larger websites the analysis of the audience follows market research. On smaller sites the audience is often defined by the topic of the site. Even there, though, it is worth looking closely.
How do I define my target audience?
The target audience definition has to be planned well. Give your audience extensive thought and only write the content afterwards. Only once everything is clear do deliberate marketing measures make sense. As a successful webmaster you should keep up with current market research data. Beyond that, data should be collected that produces actual insight. Your audience has to feel addressed and understood. The following checklist lists some of the most important questions.
Target audience definition checklist
- Which audiences do I want to address?
- Which countries do my visitors come from?
- Does my audience have a particular gender?
- Which characteristics define this clientele?
- What is the age of the audience?
- Which service do I offer and who is it aimed at?
- Does my audience show a particular buying behaviour?
- What is the average income of my audience?
- Does the income of the persona match the desired buying behaviour?
- What is the right tone of voice for my audience?
- Does the content of the site meet the expectations of the audience?
- Which characteristics and criteria would you use to describe your audience?
- Do individual members of your audience feel addressed by the website?
- For B2B (business to business): are there studies on market segmentation?
Many of these questions about the target audience definition will have no unambiguous answer. That does not matter. The more criteria are taken into account, the more precisely the consumers can be defined. Use all the data available to you and try to capture an overall picture of your audience. Take the characteristics of the audience into account and define the most important properties through persona profiles.
Target audience definition on eBesucher
Once the audience analysis is complete, a definition of the target audience exists. You can now book advertising deliberately. eBesucher offers a good dozen features for determining the audience. How precisely you narrow it down decides later how high the conversion rate of the campaign turns out.
- Pick one or several interests - if you offer an e-commerce service, advertise under Shopping & e-commerce .
- Determine the country of origin or the language of the visitor.
- Decide whether you want visitors with a particular operating system (Mac, Windows, Android and so on).
- Define the screen resolution or the browser the persona uses.
- Define the desired or the actual internet provider of the persona.
- Take user behaviour into account through time control, based on the characteristics you determined.
Important for the evaluation: so that the results of a campaign narrowed down this way can later be separated from your other visitors, UTM parameters belong in the destination URL. Without them both sources mix in the statistics.
