Difficulty With Data
What does data mean for marketing
Along with the development of digital marketing, audience data becomes more critical for the campaigns. Nevertheless, how much can data help in the marketing campaigns ? No one can measure that so far like what was happening more than a century ago. Data plays a very sophisticated role in the online marketing for now, not only for marketers but also for the media providers/publishers as well.Obviously, data is not magic spell. Learning from many campaings, I found many failures were caused by mis-configured data. Moreover , marketers should not take audience targeting data as the only factor of successful campaigns. Meanwhile, publishers , in some cases may try to convince marketers to rely more on audience data that they can maximize outcome of limited amount of inventory.
Data usage from different aspects
Typically, marketing can be devided in to 3 phases, which are pre-marketing, marketing, post-marketing. Despite there many variants of marketing methodology, all are following such framwork. Audience data is covering all the phases but taking different effects. In the pre-marketing phase, marketers use the data to define targeted users or prepare assets according to users’ preferences. During the campaign, in cocurrent digital marketing era, it can be used for real-time targeting, which optimizes each individual user engagement. After the marketing canpaigns , the predefined user group can be used to measure performance. Such is the typical usage of audience data. However, the audience data usage is mostly standing on marketers’ side. But it’s widely used by publishers as well.What’s the objective of publishers ? It’s to maximize the outcome of inventory monetization. How can audience data help on that? Before we breakdown into details, we need to clarify the publisher inventory amount is limited. No matter the publisher’s website/app is how widely used, there always is a ceiling of the inventory amount. Therefore, to make more money,publishers need to add more value to existing inventory.
- With data, publishers can tell the story that data will bring better performance to add more value to the inventory ,especially the long-tail traffic.
- Slice the inventory into pieces so that each placement can be sold to more advertisers which increases the ferociousness of impression auctions. It’s widely used in programmatic advertisement by publishers.
Due to the different objectives of marketers and publishers, marketers should be cautious when using data, especially when publishers try to convince marketers to use data to target audiences. Please remember , data is never commiting the performance. Meanwhile, marketing campaign performance is decided not only by audience data.
Predicament of data in online advertisement scenario
Data result in predicament for both publishers and marketers. When running marketing campaigns and monetization inventories, you should be careful and try to avoid them.
| Predicament | Marketers | Publishers |
|---|---|---|
| Misconfigured targeting group | Reach out to the wrong group of users and waste campaign spend | Mis-led review of performance. It adds more risky consideration of marketer in future when selecting media |
| Target group size is too small | It degrades the campaign efficiency | It will generate more long-tail traffic by focus marketer competition to a small group of users |
| Performance goes down along with increasing size | Marketers can scale their campaigns and will miss the objective sof campaigns | It generate long-tail traffic which are difficult to monetize |
Misconfigured targeting group
Usually, marketers shared brief with agencies or marketing executors in written or oral approach. However, the language/words can be comprehended in multiple ways. At the same time, the targeted uuser group are not atomic user group definition. Combinations of different groups add more complexity.For example, marketer says I want to target a group of users who are young and like using skin care products. Let’s try to analyze the defintion. We need to ask, what’s the definition of young and how to tell users who like using skin care ? Either will cause mis-configuration of the user group.
Target group size is too small
This is a very common case. Marketers put more focus on the performance which limits the targeting users to a small group of people. It will result in problem when scaling the campaign and more long-tail traffic in the inventory as well.
Performance goes down along with increasing size.
As usual, when starting a campaign ,marketers are used to create a small group of people for the pre-campaign test. However, whenever, marketers increase the size of the group, performance goes down. The campaign looks good initially, but it can’t last long enough and reach out to enough size of group of uses either. Such is mostly caused by lack of user group definition provided by publishers and mis-configured campaign objectives.
What do you need to do with data for marketing
Audience data usage is sophisticated. To take good advantage of user data, it requires tight collabration of marketers and publishers.
Align with campaign executors on the targeting group definition
Most of the misconfigrations are caused by miscommunications. Hence, it’s a must to communicate precisely about what marketers want from the beginning of each campaign. Try to use precise words in the description. For example, instead of ‘young’ , ’like using skin care products’ , etc., please try to use ‘aged from 20 -25’ , ‘bought skin care products once a month ’ . Such precise description will help executor to define targeted user group.
Don’t care too much about the accuracy.
Accuracy here, can be interpretated as the campaign requirement is too small. This is different from communication accuracy, but more about campaign requirement. If the defined targeting user group is too narrow , the scenario is not compatible with online marketing. For example, some product sellers want to target the decision maker of enterprises in order to do more B2B sales. However, the group is too small and the online marketing may not be able to cover the B2B sales scenario, it’s difficult to generate the user group as expect. In such case , marketers , executors and publisher need to sit together to discuss and agree on initial requirement of the campaigns.
Improve other factors in the campaign
As what we emphasized at the beginning, audience data are not the decisive piece of successful campaigns. Marketers need to consider creative assets, medium scenarios ,user flows, etc. to optimize the performance of campaigns.