Geo Contextual approach in Cookieless Future

Advertisers have been using cookies for years, i.e. small text files stored on the browser used as an identity — to understand consumers’ online behavior. The ‘Cookies’ anatomy provides rich data that helps brands get a better sense of who their customers are and enables them to target those customers with more relevant offerings. But this personalization comes at a cost; Consumers are increasingly concerned about who is collecting their data, how much of their behavior is being tracked, what companies are doing with that information, and who they may be selling it to.

Recently, European regulators have begun to call for a complete ban on ad targeting. In the USA, the states of Virginia and California have passed comprehensive privacy bills to address the issue. Google Chrome announced plans to end its support of third-party cookies altogether by 2023.

The era of third-party cookies is coming to an end. But does that mean abandoning personalization? The answer is a BIG NO. It is just the time for a new, rather better approach, which is both privacy compliant and valuable to the advertisers at the same time — those advertisers which power the free content on the internet. One such possible and practical approach is Geo-contextual targeting.

What is Geo-Contextual targeting?

An approach where targeting the audience is based upon their geography or location. This can be performed based on numerous identifiers including country, state, city, or zip code.

• The ability to segment down by geography allows getting very specific in terms of key motivations and desires of the target population and really craft content that will resonate
• Display ads that highlight specific selling points in key markets, translated into the local language

Why Geo-contextual approach NOW?

Ads that are contextually aligned make sense to the end customers. Once someone decides to browse certain content online (whether it’s about travel plans, sports, or the latest gadget release), they are in a certain mindset already. The ability of the advertiser to align their ads with the customer’s mindset helps them amplify their message, and therefore create real uplift and impact for a brand’s campaign — and all without sharing any personal data. It feels more in tune with the consumer’s values and interests, without making them feel concerned that their personal data has been shared with too many additional parties. The geo-contextual method of analysis considers the demographic, social, financial, behavioral, and cultural characteristics of inhabitants like a common language, ethnicity, demographic composition, income, and crime rate. A solution built around this data is known as Geo-Contextual Solution. With the sunset of third-party cookies, geo-contextual being a future-proofed dataset has made it the hero of the hour.

Key benefits of Geo-Contextual approach:

• Comprehensive Day Zero insights for the campaign — evidence-based end-to-end analytics of demographic, social, economic, ethnic, and cultural fabric of each geographical location before a campaign has even started
• Activation that is ready to go, no matter the channel or DSP — A static or dynamic dataset located in a centralized location which is ready to be consumed by any DSP for activation across any channel
• Mid-Campaign Analysis — Analyzing the performance of ongoing campaigns by identifying the factors which are influencing some geo-locations to perform better than others and hence fostering a real-time strategy change if needed
• Solutions that platter the results for multiple heterogeneous segments as per the requirement

Possible Ways to achieve Geo-Contextual Solution:

Here is a special emphasis on the word “Possible” as there can be a number of ways to build a solution around Geo-Context in the future but here we will mention a few and their progress.

Any country around the globe has its smallest geographical segment represented by Post/Zip Code. So any targeting/insights strategy built around postcodes can serve the purpose. To accomplish this task we should have a sufficient number of features that describe the demographics, economic, social, and behavioral patterns of the people residing in each postcode. To achieve this we can extend our approach as follows:

1. Creation of dataset at postcode level which contains all the information regarding demographics, economic, social and behavioral patterns assimilated using open-source datasets like Census, Crime Record Data, Income Data, etc and further bolstered by utilizing third-party data sources such as Skyrise, Experian, Urban Analytix, Environics, etc to create a comprehensive set of features
2. Index or normalize/standardize the different features as per the use case or product requirement
3. Use various clustering methodologies to bucket postcodes/similar segments into the same cluster

Some sample work on UK Geo-Contextual solution demonstrating the different segments that can be created is depicted below:

A complete product buildup starting from Data collection, Table creation, through to activation around the Geo-Contextual approach can have a structural flow as shown below:

Challenges and Bottlenecks in Geo-Contextual approach:

Underlying all the possibilities Geo-Contextual solutions possess in the post Cookie world, there will be many challenges that will crop up as we move ahead with such solutions. Here are a few to mention:

1. Granularity — Broad geo contextual targeting can prevent the amplification of the marketing message or proper engagement with the right audience
2. Actionability — To produce actionable insights there will be a need for a plethora of features at the postcode level which is a tough task to find. Any incorrect approximation or imputation could result in completely wrong results
3. Accuracy — Many contextual solutions rely heavily on Keywords but over-reliance on single triggers can lead to False Positives

Conclusion:

In spite of all the challenges, the Geo-Contextual approach is still amongst the best bets in the post-cookie era. Building solutions leveraging the right depth and breadth of technology in dynamic accumulation of different features at the geographical level can deliver outstanding media effectiveness.