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Microsoft Invest - Client-Side segmentation

  • Article

The most common way of building audience segments is by placing client-side segment pixels on websites or creatives, signaling that a user has visited a web page or taken a simple action. If you're new to audience targeting or if you have relatively simple audience targeting strategies, then this method is probably the one that you'll want to use.

Use cases

  • Performance / retargeting campaigns - As users browse the Internet, they visit sites that move them along the attribution funnel (or a series of interactions that elicit a desired action from the user, such as a page visit, conversion, etc.). You, as a buyer, might set up several ad campaigns each targeting a particular segment that corresponds to a section of the attribution funnel. Users are added to these segments as they visit different pages relevant to the acquisition event such as visiting the home page, adding items to a shopping cart page, a purchase confirmation page, etc.

  • Brand awareness campaigns - If you're a buyer or seller, and are looking to do basic clustering or modeling of audiences, you can also use client-side segment pixels. In this instance, the purpose would be for branding, ultimately giving a signal that a user has visited a particular page or taken a specific action. While similar to the retargeting example above, in this situation, the goal is to bring brand awareness to the relevant audience rather than prompting a user response or action. An example of this is a "luxury car enthusiast" client-side segment pixel firing on a high end online magazine, where the audience would then be bought against by trading desks representing the branding efforts for BMW.

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