Digital advertising guide

The opportunities of a data-driven digital advertising strategy

This may come as a surprise, but many advertisers and marketers struggle with how to make the most of data-driven marketing and advertising. According to a recent Association of National Advertisers survey of 93 top marketers, the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) aren’t the actual ones being used most often.

Audience—Who you should connect with. This could be existing customers or prospects.

Context—Where should you engage with your audience.

Measurement—Understand if and how they responded to your messaging.

In fact, many of the most commonly leveraged KPIs are considered to be "head fakes"—KPIs that may be endorsed broadly by the industry but aren’t that useful in driving campaign effectiveness or business outcomes. The key is to separate the data from the noise.

To gather the right data and then apply it properly as you build out your campaigns, focus your energies on three core data pillars: audience, context, and measurement.

With the right tools to effectively tap into each of these data pillars, not only is it less daunting to build and use a data-driven strategy, your campaigns are more successful. Using data correctly to build highly personalized campaigns does save money and increase ROI, delivering five to eight times the ROI on campaign spend. Let’s see how:

The 3 data pillars for effective digital advertising

Audience

With a strong audience strategy, marketers and advertisers gain a better understanding of who their ideal customers and prospects are. With that information, they can tailor their campaigns—including the message, creative assets, and media plans—to make the largest positive business outcome.

But not all audience strategies are created equal. An effective data-driven audience strategy uses consumer data with the highest potential for impact and influence. While there are many ways to segment, analyze, combine, and implement customer data to plan and build your audience, the ultimate goal is to drive smarter advertising investments using campaigns that increase lead generation, sales, or brand awareness (or a combination of all three).

Effective audience planning relies on three segmentation practices that provide unique audience insights and attributes. In other words, providing value without sacrificing scale.

Context

Context, or contextual intelligence, is the ability to analyze content to understand how people interact with it. Digital marketers and advertisers use context to:

Measurement

Standard baseline metrics

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions

Cross-device and platform metrics

• Desktop
• Mobile
• In-app
• Video
• Connected TV/over-the-top (OTT)

Advanced metrics

Invalid traffic

Did the ad generate bot traffic or human traffic?

Viewability

Was the ad viewed, and how long was it viewed?

Brand safety

Can you monitor and track brand safety efforts across platforms and ad formats?

People-based reach and frequency

Did your message reach the most relevant audience (the segment of the population who would care about the message), and how many times did that audience see your message?

Audience

Did you reach the right people, and are they engaging with your ads?

Attention

Did your creative deliver interactions and capture the audience’s interest?

Return on investment (ROI)

Did your digital campaign impact offline sales lift?

Deploying the 3 data pillars: A checklist

The next step is to learn how to apply audience, context, and measurement to your digital campaign. Here’s a three-part, step-by-step checklist.

Step 1: Define your audience

Here’s an activation checklist to write a winning audience plan:

1. Collect

Gather all available first-party data and analyze for trends. Determine if there are patterns in your data that reveal who is purchasing, what channels they’re using, what types of content resonates, and other metrics.

2. Augment

Supplement your first-party CRM and ERP data with high-quality, third-party data to increase scale. Onboarding solutions with high match rates across specific ID types can help with this.

3. Create

Build behavioral profiles of your audience. Combine your audience’s online and offline behavior to develop a clearer picture of who your ideal customers and prospects are and how best to reach them.

4. Personalize

Tailor your message and creative based on what you discover about your audience and where they can be reached. Balance the positioning of your brand and advertising/marketing campaigns with the needs and wants of your target audience.

5. Measure

Evaluate all relevant aspects of your campaign to determine if the messaging and creative resonates. You may need to optimize the channel, creative, platform, or even the audience/customer segment to get the desired results for your campaign. For more information, see Step 3.

Getting better outcomes: 5 questions to ask your data provider to get high-quality data

• 1. How do you measure the performance of your audiences?
• 2. What signals or data points are used to build audiences?
• 3. How do you validate the accuracy of your data?
• 4. How do you ensure data privacy?
• 5. What is your approach to audience modeling?

Step 2: Connect with your audience in the right environment

Here’s an activation checklist to improve reach, maintain relevance, and reach the right audience:

1. Protect

Keep your ads from appearing next to negative, inflammatory, or inappropriate online content with an always-on brand safety solution.

2. Build

Build custom contextual segments using keywords and phrases that align with your brand or campaign for greater control over where your advertising is appearing online.

3. Partner

Use a context partner to help automate the building and updating of custom keyword segments. Doing so will allow you to capitalize on popular trends as they unfold and appear next to new, brand-safe content as it’s published.

4. Optimize

Optimize your campaign and get creative with your context strategy by expanding beyond the obvious environments and content that will serve your campaign. For example, a travel company running a summer campaign may want to consider targeting content about swimsuits and outdoor gear in addition to travel inspiration and tips.

Getting better outcomes: 7 questions to ask your context partner/provider

• 1. What is the value of using both people-based and contextual audiences, and how do I use them interchangeably?
• 2. How effective is contextual targeting in finding actual buyers?
• 3. How quickly can you identify trending content, and at what scale?
• 4. How quickly can you make custom segments available for use?
• 5. How do you guarantee that my message will appear in the right environments?
• 6. Do you offer full-page or page-level analysis of keywords?
• 7. How do your contextual segments perform?

Step #3: Measure, manage, and attribute your campaign

Use this checklist to create a robust measurement plan with your measurement partner:

Align strategies

Align media measurement strategies with business objectives to determine the right metrics to track to determine campaign effectiveness. For example, if your business objective is to increase product awareness by 10% and gain 5% of incremental audiences in six months, then you should track the following metrics:

1. Sales lift
2. Online-to-offline sales impact
3. Viewability and attention

Identify criteria

Determine what criteria will be needed to provide details on how your campaign and ads are performing. Consider these baseline metrics that are commonly used for display, video, and mobile ads.

Measure effectiveness

Track the effectiveness of your campaigns by using three key performance indicators (KPIs):

Getting better outcomes: 5 questions to ask your measurement partner/provider

• 1. Did I reach real people with my impressions?
• 2. Did I reach people relevant to my campaign objectives, across the right channels?
• 3. Did my campaign drive the outcomes I was expecting?
• 4. How strong are your verification capabilities across brand safety, content quality, media quality, and fraud protection?
• 5. What is your methodology?

Trends and themes in data

There continues to be opportunities in digital advertising. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital advertising grew about 6%, compared to an 8% decline in the broader market. Digital advertising is expected to grow 14% in 2021, boosted (in part) by the 60% of digital buyers planning to shift their linear TV dollars to CTV this year.

Social media content

Brand safety is important: 9 out 10 advertisers are concerned about possible adjacency to controversial content posted on social media, while more than half (52%) have dealt with brand safety issues multiple times, leading to challenges with consumer perception.

And the challenge is a real one. Almost half of consumers (48%) would boycott or rethink purchasing your brand based on the content it appeared next to. The result? Last year almost half (46%) of advertisers and buyers either paused or cancelled planned social media ad placements.

Connected TV (CTV) and OTT

Linear TV is still expected to make up the bulk the traditional media budget, but it’s down 24% in terms of ad spend, as consumers eschew traditional TV programs. Buyers, on the other hand, see connected TV as more targeted, efficient, and able to reach more unique customers. In a recent Interactive Advertising Bureau report, buyers reported that with CTV/OTT they reached a younger audience, had more flexibility, and could easily measure ROI.

Data challenges for 2021

Trend #1: The need for greater data transparency and accountability

With new regulations popping up, along with various headlines about data collection practices, it’s more important than ever to ensure that marketers and advertisers have a firm grip on their data and processes.

But new regulations aren’t the only issue. It’s estimated that the costs related to digital advertising fraud grew exponentially between 2018 and 2022—from US$19 to $44 billion dollars. In the United States, the costs incurred due to digital ad fraud was believed to reach US$11 billion in 2018. With the growing digitization of advertising processes, there is a parallel risk of fraud. Current ad fraud detection processes are not yet fully developed. So as the number of ads done programmatically increases, the majority of ads end up being served to bots instead of potential customers.

Unsurprisingly, nearly a quarter of global marketers expressed big concerns about ad fraud, with an almost 50% stating that they were apprehensive about the issue. Until effective tracking tools and stricter regulations on online ad publishing are put into effect, ad fraud will remain a significant problem for advertisers and media buyers.

Trend #2: A video advertising evolution

In the era of cord cutting, TV advertising is changing. It’s still a behemoth—but with smartphones, streaming services, and internet-enabled television devices, digital advertising spend will continue to grow at an exponentially faster pace than TV ad spend.

As TV advertising evolves with the rise of digital, advertisers will be able to:

• Incrementally reach the right consumer by extending campaigns to reach across both digital and TV
• Ensure brand safety, suitability, and relevance across a publisher’s video advertising inventory in an increasingly programmatic landscape with contextual intelligence
• Measure the business impact of TV/video campaigns and provide insights to optimize those campaigns going forward

Trend #3: The continued rise of digital audio

Radio isn’t dead. Far from it. After a slight drop at the beginning of the pandemic, there has been an impressive rise in digital audio listenership.

This growth is an amazing opportunity for marketers. Some creative ways in which data is being used to improve digital audio advertising results include:

• More than half (54%) of US adults ages 18 to 44 listen to ad-supported streaming audio content.
• Almost 6 out of 10 (59%) of those same adults who are paid audio subscribers listened to ad-supported audio.
• More US adults (53%) are listening to their favorite music, talk shows, and podcasts across streaming platforms instead of traditional platforms—for the first time ever.

• Playlist curation: To help advertisers reach more millennials on their platform, Spotify attempted to understand their audience through music, pinpointing what they call “key moments.” Each moment is targeted at millennials during certain everyday activities they engage in, such as “chilling” or driving. They home in on details, such as how users are listening (platform), what time of day to reach them, and ideas for music genres.
• Personalized ad messaging: Leveraging the relationships many podcast listeners have with their favorite shows, brands have been giving hosts creative reign to read the ad copy how they prefer, inject personality, and even ad-lib their own experiences. This gives the promotion a more genuine feel, increasing the chance that listeners will pay attention. There’s no doubt that marketers who build digital audio into their future advertising budgets will see a payoff.