Using Intent Analysis to Tailor Programmatic Ads

Intent analysis should do more than just show whether or not an account is in-market. Such a simplistic, boolean decision forces you to decide when and how to execute a marketing strategy in response to building intent momentum. Until that point, you’re stuck doing nothing. After that point, you’re turning on all of your sales and market strategies (sales calls, programmatic advertising, etc.), hoping one of your messages connects with your buyer at the right moment of intent, with the right content to engage them.

Best-in-Class intent analysis, on the other hand, takes a more comprehensive and enlightened approach. By measuring the recent cadence and density of intent signals, an intent score is produced. This score exhibits more than whether or not an account is on the buying journey. It shows where on that journey the account currently is.

What should you do with this score?

With this information, strategies such as programmatic advertising can be adapted throughout the buying journey.  Aberdeen recommends creating three sets of intent-fueled programmatic ads for each campaign. This helps to target buyers at three levels of intent: early-nurturing stage, mid-consideration stage, and late-vendor sorting stage. In the figure below, you can see the types of ads and when they should be executed in accordance with the buyer’s intent score and their place within the buyer’s journey.

Intent programmatic ads trump traditional profile programmatic advertising by a dramatic margin — in fact, they perform twice as well when it comes to click-thru and view-thru rates, as well as spend and conversion. Unlike their traditional counterpart that only targets a company profile, intent-fueled programmatic ads target specific devices showing intent, ensuring they’re placed in the hands of those who actually make purchase decisions.

But Best-in-Class intent analysis doesn’t stop there. Because even if you can get your ads and content in the right hands, it’s only relevant if it’s in their hands at the right time. In order to achieve tangible increasing ad response rates, ads (and as a result, the content said ads are publicizing) must be relevant to your target account’s stage within the buying journey. Traditional profile programmatic ads serve only as a general, blanket promotion that wastes valuable bait on too many fish that just wont bite.

With an intent-fueled programmatic advertising strategy, you’re placing the right message in the right context, and at the right time, to specific devices showing intent — inevitably boosting response rates and ROI.