Audience targeting is no longer simply about reaching the right person with the right message at the right time. As consumers use more devices and operate across more channels, marketers now need to consider device, channel, context and behavior. And they need to reach people with the pinpoint accuracy that ensures they receive messages that are most appropriate to their immediate needs.
Today’s data providers and ad tech firms are coming up with more and more ways to mine consumer information to create more nuanced behavioral targeting models. Using a mix of first- and third-party data, they are better able to accurately identify and verify consumer targets and devices, ensuring advertisers have the scale and performance to target their campaigns and evaluate success.
Still, advertisers remain challenged to target consumers accurately across devices and channels. A recent research report from eConsultancy found that digital publishers have to tackle a number of targeting obstacles, including recognizing visitors across devices, technology fragmentation and lack of scale. For example, cross-device accuracy is hampered by questions about the methods used to identify devices and accurately match them to users. Cross-channel methodologies need to have a clearer picture of how online messaging impacts offline purchasing behavior.
Mobile Targeting Takes Off
Despite concerns about the data used to identify mobile audiences, mobile ad targeting is on the rise. Significant progress has been made to match people to devices, one of the primary reasons that digital ad dollars have been shifting to mobile. With a clearer picture of who is using a mobile device—and the behaviors that usage signifies—mobile audiences have become a fast-growing target.
“Today there is an abundance of data and data mapping capabilities, so availability of data on mobile users is significantly less of an issue than it was several years ago,” says Vikas Gupta, director of marketing at mobile data provider Factual. “The challenge now is around transparency, trust and accessibility. If I’m a marketer, my key questions are: How do I know what data I’m buying—where it comes from and how good is it—and is it easily accessible through my preferred platforms?”
Mobile data is also being used to create personas, predefined groups of users sharing key characteristics. Using first-party data gleaned from device ownership, device usage, app usage and location, providers are better able to identify consumer characteristics and behaviors, and also identify when and how those personas evolve.
“The value in mobile is in targeting personas,” explains Kevin McGinnis, president of Pinsight Media, which uses exclusive mobile carrier data as part of its targeting solution. “It’s hard to work with a single persona because people are dynamic and they change in seconds, not days or weeks. What we see is that the group of people who match a persona that an advertiser targets in May, there’s massive turnover in that group by June. The freshness of carrier data really makes a difference and the ability to tweak an audience with behavior data inputs gives our clients the advantage.”
Data-Driven Targeting Enhances TV
TV has long been the dominant ad channel, but it is hardly a secret that TV’s share of media spend has been falling; digital ad spend is expected to overtake TV and claim the top spot in the near future. The reason is simple: Advertisers feel they have limited visibility into who their ads are being shown to on TV.
A recent study from AT&T AdWorks found that the vast majority of media buyers and brand advertisers were frustrated over their ability to target their TV buys as finely as they would like, with about two thirds indicating that there is too much waste in TV.
The impact? There is a growing demand for addressable TV, the technology that allows advertisers to reach specific households with relevant ads and improve the efficiency of their media buys. The targeting takes advantage of the rich data and insights available via set-top boxes, connected TVs and other connected devices. The targeting and buys can then be extended to desktops, phones and other devices, depending on context and location.
“The ad industry is moving more and more toward addressable advertising, and beyond that, to addressable cross-screen capabilities,” says Maria Mandel Dunsche, VP/head of marketing at AT&T AdWorks. “The number of addressable campaigns that we ran last year more than doubled from the previous year. And we think 2016 will be the watershed year for addressability with almost every major advertiser using it.”
The Challenge of Cross-Channel Measurement
The last piece of the puzzle for many marketers is understanding how online targeting impacts offline sales. This is particularly relevant to segments such as CPG where the vast majority of sales occur offline. While targeting can involve a number of digital touchpoints—digital display, mobile, social, email—it can be difficult to gauge their impact once the consumer enters a physical store.
Google recently released results from a new solution powered by Oracle Data Cloud that measures the offline sales lift of online ads. By integrating tools and insights from Oracle Data Cloud, it was able to determine that 78 percent of TrueView video campaigns running on YouTube showed an increase in offline sales, with 61 percent driving a statistically significant lift.
One campaign Google measured, Gatorade’s “We Love Sweat,” earned $13.50 worth of sales in return for every dollar spent (in part because of strong creative and branding). Gatorade’s campaign also delivered a 16 percent lift in sales among new buyers that had seen the video vs. new buyers that had not—according to Oracle Data Cloud a typical lift in this metric hovers around 2.5 percent. One reason for the success: Topic targeting and remarketing was more impactful than traditional demographic targeting.
Check Out the Full Text of the Adweek Audience Targeting Guide
