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Learn how to activate your audience segments using boosting and filtering strategies to maximize campaign performance and ROI.

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Audience Activation Methods

Topsort provides two powerful methods for applying audience targeting to your campaigns, each serving different strategic objectives.

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Boosting Strategy

Dynamically adjust bid values based on audience membership to prioritize high-value users while maintaining broader reach. This approach allows you to compete more aggressively for premium segments without completely excluding other users.
Boosting works by applying multipliers to your base bids when users match specific audience criteria. For example, a premium beauty brand might apply a 1.5x boost for their “Premium Beauty Buyers” segment, increasing their $2.00 base bid to $3.00 for high-value customers while keeping the standard $2.00 bid for other users.
Boosting strategies typically increase conversion rates by 25-40% while maintaining cost efficiency across your broader audience.

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Filtering Strategy

Apply hard exclusions to ensure ads only reach your precisely defined target audience. This approach maximizes conversion rates by focusing spend exclusively on high-intent users.
Filtering works best for campaigns with limited budgets, premium products, or when you need to minimize wasted impressions. For example, a new product launch might filter to show ads only to “Electronics Buyers” and “Early Adopters” segments, ensuring the campaign reaches exclusively high-intent users.
Filtering strategies can increase conversion rates by 2-3x but will reduce overall reach and impression volume.

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Advanced Targeting Examples

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Multi-Segment Boosting

Create sophisticated bidding strategies that apply different multipliers based on multiple audience characteristics.
Example Strategy:
  • Base bid: $1.50
  • High-value customers: 2.0x boost ($3.00)
  • Recent browsers: 1.3x boost ($1.95)
  • Seasonal shoppers: 1.5x boost ($2.25)
  • Overlap bonus: Additional 0.2x for users in multiple segments
This layered approach ensures you’re competitive for your most valuable audiences while maintaining efficiency.

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Dynamic Filtering

Combine multiple audience criteria with logical operators to create precise targeting rules.
Example Configuration:
INCLUDE: (Electronics Buyers OR Tech Early Adopters)
AND High-Value Customers ($500+ purchase history)
EXCLUDE: Recent Purchasers (last 14 days)
OR Current Campaign Participants
This creates a focused audience of high-intent, high-value prospects not currently being targeted.

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How the System Works

Topsort’s audience targeting system processes data through several interconnected components that work together to deliver real-time targeting capabilities.
The Segments API ingests audience data from CDPs and processes userID hashing to maintain privacy compliance. The Audience Builder then combines this first-party CDP data with real-time behavioral data from your platform to create comprehensive user profiles.
The User Store maintains current segment memberships with continuous online updates, ensuring targeting data stays fresh. During campaign creation, the Campaign API enables audience selection and configuration of targeting logic.
Finally, the Auction API performs real-time audience matching during bid requests, instantly determining which campaigns should compete for each user based on their segment memberships.
This architecture ensures audience data remains current while enabling split-second targeting decisions during live auctions.

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Real-Time Decision Flow

  1. Auction Request: User visits your site, triggering an ad auction
  2. User Matching: System instantly matches opaqueUserId against segment memberships
  3. Campaign Evaluation: Active campaigns check audience criteria and apply boosts or filters
  4. Bid Calculation: Final bids calculated with audience-based adjustments
  5. Winner Selection: Highest adjusted bid wins and serves the ad
This entire process happens in milliseconds, ensuring optimal user experience while maximizing targeting precision.

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Strategy Selection Guide

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Choose Boosting When:

  • You want to maintain broad reach while prioritizing high-value segments
  • Budget allows for increased competition on premium audiences
  • Goal is to improve efficiency rather than maximize precision
  • Testing different audience values against each other

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Choose Filtering When:

  • Budget is limited and precision is critical
  • Launching premium or niche products
  • Audience sizes are large enough to maintain scale after filtering
  • Campaign success depends on reaching only qualified prospects

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Hybrid Approaches:

  • Use filtering for qualification criteria (e.g., geographic, category interest)
  • Apply boosting within filtered audiences for value-based prioritization
  • Create campaign variants testing both approaches with performance comparison

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Performance Optimization

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Measuring Success

Track key metrics to evaluate audience targeting effectiveness:
  • Conversion Rate Lift: Compare targeted vs. broad campaigns
  • Cost Per Acquisition: Monitor CPA improvements from precision targeting
  • Return on Ad Spend: Calculate ROAS improvements from boosting strategies
  • Audience Utilization: Track what percentage of target segments see ads

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Continuous Improvement

  • A/B Test Strategies: Compare boosting multipliers and filtering criteria
  • Segment Performance: Identify highest-performing audience combinations
  • Seasonal Adjustments: Update targeting based on shopping cycles and trends
  • Cross-Campaign Analysis: Optimize audience allocation across multiple campaigns

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Next Steps

Ready to implement these strategies? Start with audience setup and integration, or explore management best practices for ongoing optimization and governance.
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