How excited were we when Simpli.fi made some ads with our ad builder? Answer: very!

Us. Excited.

 
Here are two of the ads they made (the 728×90 has been scaled down to fit our blog…sorry if the images appear a little distorted):

 
We were curious as to exactly what “element-level display advertising” meant, and Simpli.fi was kind enough to give us a quick run-down. We thought the concept was worth sharing.
 

In case you’ve forgotten why targeting is important…

Canned Banners handles display ad creative, but targeting is extremely important as well. Even with the best ads ever made, a poorly-targeted campaign will fall flat, and good targeting can help inform the creative process so that successive iterations of display ads do a better and better job of connecting with prospects.

Consider a few basic questions and how the answers might affect the design of your ads: is a given viewer young or old? Rich or poor? Male or female? Between those 6 ultra-basic attributes, there are already 8 separate “archetypes” you need to think about when creating and testing ads. Now imagine that you’re a company like Procter & Gamble, with thousands of products and tens (hundreds?) of millions of customers. How do you stay on top of the targeting challenge?
 

Element-level targeting

Simpli.fi specializes in “element-level” targeting, which basically treats every member of your audience as a unique prospect with unique attributes. This might seem like an obvious approach, but it’s not the way most ad campaigns are run.

Consider a hypothetical search retargeting campaign for a major retailer. The retailer might easily target 100,000+ keywords across various product categories and brands. To manage this much data, advertisers often create audience segments like this one for Prada handbags:
 

 
Obviously this approach has value. The campaign manager will have insight into the behavior of Prada handbag buyers as a group, as well as the ability to fine-tune the performance of the Prada handbag segment against other segments such as “prada shoes,” or “skinny jeans.”

Simpli.fi, however, takes this a step further with element-level targeting. In this case, an “element” would be a keyword. And when you gain insight into specific keyword performance, you get a clearer picture of what’s really going on in the audience segment:
 

 
In this case, you could further optimize the campaign by targeting the three higher-performing keywords more aggressively, while dialing back the investment in the under-performing keywords.

You can read more about Simpli.fi’s pitch on their website. They offer element-level targeting across several different marketing channels, not just search retargeting. And of course, when you need 100,000 ads to target 100,000 “elements,” you’ll know who to come to.