The Build Awareness objective allows you to tell a brand story in a way that resonates with the audience and creates a connection. Our sophisticated audience targeting works together with our AI to create awareness with the right audiences, at the right time, and drive high-quality new site traffic.
Use it to introduce your brand to prospects and boost website visits from net new audiences. It is optimized to drive impressions and reach, and is available on Web and Connected TV.
Unlike the Drive Engagement and Maximize Conversions objectives, which retarget people who already know you, Build Awareness reaches users who have not been to your site before but have been identified as high-potential prospects for your business.
We provide a diverse set of targeting strategies to help you find the right target audience and make an impact on their decision-making process.
Build Awareness targeting strategies
When you select Build Awareness, the objective picker lists three targeting strategies. In the campaign builder they live in two different places under Ad Groups > Targeting:
- Lookalike and Third Party Audience are the two options inside the Audience card. You choose one per ad group.
- Contextual Categories & Keywords is a separate card, set independently of your audience choice.
Lookalike
Our AI does all the work of identifying new shoppers who look and act like your best customers. By targeting digital profiles similar to those of your existing customers, Lookalike automates new customer acquisition by attracting new audiences who are likely to convert and become customers.
Powered by our proprietary IntentMap, this tactic helps you drive brand awareness by targeting a broad range of digital profiles who are similar to your existing website visitors tracked by the Pixel, by serving them ads on Web display and CTV. Lookalike audiences are automatically created and maintained for ease of use and low campaign maintenance.
In the builder, select Lookalike in the Audience card. The card describes it as finding people similar to your existing customers, and the collapsed card shows Lookalike as its summary once selected.
Available on Web and Connected TV. Select your channel in the Channel card at the top of Campaign Settings.
Third Party Audience
Get yourself in front of people who will love your brand and products.
With Third Party Audiences, you can identify what your ideal customer looks like, and find more like them by targeting attributes (like age, gender, net worth) as well as their interests (sports, fashion, food, and more).
This tactic will help you grow your customer base, by delivering Web display and CTV ads to selected audiences that meet your ideal customer's behavior, demographics, interests, lifestyle, business, financials, life events, location, and purchase predictors. Our proprietary bidding algorithm BidIQ powers and enhances our robust Third Party Audience segments to reach the right customers, at the right time with the right message without wasting budget and resources.
In the builder, select Third Party Audience in the Audience card. The card describes it as targeting based on interests, demographics, or life events.
Available on Web and Connected TV (US only).
Contextual Categories & Keywords
Contextual targeting allows you to display your brand next to relevant web content or CTV programming. You can choose from categories that are relevant to your industry or target market (like sports, educational, or travel sites).
This tactic will help increase brand awareness by driving new visitors to your website by showcasing your ads alongside Web content categories or CTV programming categories that align with your brand's message or product offering.
In the Contextual Categories & Keywords card, choose one of the following:
- All content — Automatically show ads where people are likely to engage. This is the default.
- Specific content — Select specific categories and keywords. Ads then run on content that matches any of the categories and keywords you add.
With Specific content selected, you can configure:
- Target Categories — Add one or more categories; entries are combined with Or.
- Target Keywords — Select any keyword of your choice to determine the webpage content you want your ads associated with. Type a keyword and press Enter, or upload a .CSV. Use capitalization for acronyms, proper nouns, and company names to ensure accurate targeting.
- Brand safety and suitability > Exclude Keywords — Block content you do not want your ads to appear next to.
To support keyword targeting, we partner with the biggest suppliers of ad inventory to access the text on a website for every ad impression AdRoll serves. The collapsed card summarizes your setup, for example Including 2 categories, 1 keyword.
What to expect during the first month
During the first month of your Build Awareness campaign, it is important to consider the ramping period. The campaign begins by gathering data about the prospective audience you’re targeting and which of your ads work best across each channel. The campaign then applies those learnings to find the best prospective audiences and tunes your performance toward achieving your goal to drive new engaged users.
All campaigns have a ramping period of 2 - 4 weeks so it is important to allow time for the campaign to learn.
Additionally, it’s important to keep in mind that the targeted traffic of a Build Awareness campaign lives at the very top of your funnel, so it’ll take a bit longer to get them to the point of conversion than a Drive Engagement or Maximize Conversions campaign, which target traffic in your mid and lower funnel.
While you are building the campaign, the Estimated Audience Size panel beside your targeting indicates how many people your current setup can reach. If it reads Estimation not available, there is not yet enough targeting detail to calculate a reach.
Analyze your campaign performance
Because a Build Awareness campaign lives at the top of your funnel, its performance will be reflected through different metrics than your mid and lower-funnel campaigns. This objective is optimized to drive impressions and reach, and its default bid setup is Impressions with Automatic Target CPM, both labeled Recommended in the builder.
On the dashboard, metric columns are specific to the campaign objective, so a Build Awareness campaign surfaces impressions and reach rather than conversions.
Check out our brand awareness performance and optimization tips for more info.