Audience Suppression: The Most Effective Optimization Technique You’re Not Using

A Pain in the Ads: History of Audience Suppression and why it’s always been ignored

In the world of digital marketing, the concept of preventing users from seeing your ads might sound counterintuitive. After all, isn't the goal for your ads to reach as many people as possible? Isn’t the success of any ad campaign based on who you target, not who you don’t target? Well, not exactly. The digital ad landscape is changing. Marketers are now expected to do more with less, making precision and quality more important than reach and quantity. That's where user suppression strategies come into play.

Here’s a scenario we’re all familiar with – you’re scrolling through your social media feed or reading your favorite online publication, and you keep seeing the same ad for a product you recently bought. It's annoying, right? Not only does it waste the advertiser's money, but it also creates a frustrating experience for you as a user. If the ad is having any effect at all, it’s decreasing the chances you buy from that brand again. 

This is where one the little-used ad optimization tactic, audience suppression, steps in. Audience suppression is a simple yet powerful tactic that ensures your ads are shown to the right people at the right time, avoiding precisely this and hundreds of other scenarios that waste up to 40% of more of ad budgets.

At its core, audience suppression is about respecting users' time and attention while optimizing your ad spend. In this article, we'll dive into the evolving landscape of audience suppression, exploring why it matters, how it works, and the secrets to doing it effectively. By the end, you'll understand how to leverage this powerful optimization tactic to enhance your marketing efficiency and boost overall growth.

From Manual to Automated: The Evolution of Audience Suppression

Audience suppression is not a new concept in the world of paid advertising. In its simplest form, audience suppression’s goal is to ensure that your ads aren't shown to users for whom ads won’t increase their chances of ultimately buying something from you in the future. This refines your more broad-based targeting tactics by using your own first-party data, thereby making your campaigns as efficient and cost-effective as possible. 

If that’s the case, why are so few advertisers leveraging suppression audiences with the same level of effort and attention as they are all other targeting tactics?

While on the surface it may seem a simple thing, deploying intelligent, real time, omnichannel suppression strategies can be a very complex process.

A Real Pain in the Ads: Manual Suppression Lists and Pixel Tracking

In the early days of digital marketing, audience suppression was a manual and time-consuming task. Marketers would have to create and manually update dozens of exclusion lists, meticulously compiling the available IDs (email, phone #, device ID, etc.) of customers who had completed certain actions or met certain criteria. They would then upload those lists and apply them to individual campaigns and ad sets where they wanted suppression rules to apply. Many advertisers still try to manage ad suppression this way. It’s a tedious, error-prone process, largely ineffective because of latency, and not feasible for large-scale or complex ad strategies.

Pixel-based tracking emerged as another tool in the marketer's arsenal. By placing a conversion pixel on a website, advertisers could track users who had completed SOME actions and tell the ad platforms not to advertise to them. This was initially easier than manual list suppression, but more limited in the suppression strategies one could use. Creating and managing these pixel tags also required technical know-how and constant monitoring. Pixel-based suppression is now almost entirely ineffective because of privacy regulations and identity deprecation.

Real-Time Data: The Game-Changer for Ad Targeting

The game-changer for audience suppression came with the advent of solutions that allowed advertisers to activate real-time first-party data across all marketing channels, including paid ads. Modern audience suppression strategies leverage the power of first-party data to create real-time audiences and automatically update them via ad platforms’ audience APIs to create dynamic exclusion lists. This means that instead of relying on manual workflows or ineffective pixels, advertisers can now harness their real-time user data to define nuanced criteria for eliminating wasted ad spend at the campaign or ad set level.

Real-time data activation is what has upgraded suppression from a “nice-to-have” targeting tactic that may save ~5% to a make-or-break optimization that could mean the difference in a campaign making money or losing money. 

Now that we’ve covered the basics of audience suppression, in parts two and three of this series we’ll look into its impact in terms of cost savings and marketing performance improvements, as well as the 101 suppression strategies every advertiser should be leveraging.