Personalization
Reaching an individual consumer and delivering relevant, high quality creative content tailored from huge swaths of data requires synchronizing the deployment, timing and medium (device) choice for effective engagement with the user.
Tracking and identifying a customer’s omnichannel journey is now part and parcel of programmatic advertising technology from which a holistic user profile is generated and stored. Capturing behavioral attributes across social channel and digital platform use, web browsing activity and offline tracking (physical store visits, smartphone geolocation) provides insight to the most effective ad serving strategy during consumer micro-moments.
Traditionally, digital advertising tools such as Google AdWords measured and compiled engagement and conversion data based on a cloaked or invisible user identity generating analytics across display and search campaigns. Large volumes of personal user data now amplify these traditional metrics of click-through rate (CTR), cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Application of A/B testing and automated functionality in a retargeting campaign empowers the advertiser to further narrow selected samples and hone in precisely on a single target user. Scaling this approach empowers advertisers with delivery of high quality ad content at precisely coordinated times to maximize both conversions and leads.
This highly granular level of detail can still be considered the relative beginning of advanced programmatic advertising strategy.
Collecting data from an individual’s transit across mobile, display, video and extending offline yields insights including brand affinity, product interest, shopping style, device usage tendencies and timing to name a few. The power of these actionable, performance-driven insights collected on a user-by-user basis is amplified with cross-device tracking. Consumers that originate product or service related searches on mobile will purchase at a later time and on a different device (usually desktop) if not on an altogether different day.
On the media ad inventory front, automated ad bidding and ad inventory placement using predictive analytics and modeling enhances campaign execution with trading tools such as a newly created trading platform exchange engineered from NASDAQ technology allowing publisher and advertiser capabilities in transacting guaranteed contracts of premium advertising inventory. Automated media buying and bidding optimization is further amplified through a personalization and user attribution criteria standpoint in selecting the most valuable inventory. A staggering thought to consider is the significantly higher volume of media exchange transactions versus financial securities trades occurring in a given day.
Targeting a single consumer based on identifying and acting on micro-moment insights is possible from an exact-timing, content-tailored and channel-specific ad serving perspective. Campaign optimization based on retargeting already identified users on the verge of conversion coupled with the personalized insights gleaned from data enables marketers to concentrate on identifying and reaching consumers with ad inventory while the consumer is still in the purchase funnel just prior to conversion.
Timing is everything.
Using already owned data i.e. from a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) database and connecting the data to an agency’s media buy is an obvious choice. Data tracking extends far beyond owned platforms to pixel tracking enabling an advertiser to track a consumer’s online journey incorporating a data management platform (DMP) where data generated from offline activity including physical store visits, credit and debit card transactions and geographical coordinates all amplify the selection and execution of media buys. Mobile device ID tagging provides the link connecting online activity with offline tracking.
After data is collected from user behavior and activity, ad placement now incorporates verification techniques confirming the actual targeted user’s identity with cookie syncing just prior to the ad transaction occurring via a media inventory exchange and resulting in ad serving on the appropriate channel at the appropriate time to reach the targeted and identified individual.
The flow of data around consumer product interest and search for X (product, knowledge or service) is evaluated in the context of what user action will be taken to obtain X to intersect with that user on the correct device and at the appropriate time to ensure that eventual conversion is captured. These journeys that involve intent and future action are all understood in the context of highly personalized user habits and behaviors.
Identifying future consumer intent through micro-moment driven insights is possible with a large volume of emerging artificial intelligence driven platforms reimagining a multidimensional marketing playing field.
Ian Herman is a digital advertising and marketing specialist with a background in programmatic (automated, data driven, real-time marketing). Read more on Ian’s programmatic advertising blog AxialX
