How to Spin First-Party Data into Advertising Gold
Google is finally acting on its oft-repeated threat to kill third-party cookies. This is the latest draconian measure that shuts down an important way that businesses have tracked consumers across the web to serve up more relevant content to them. And yet as The Wall Street Journal bluntly puts it, “Advertisers still aren’t ready.” We recently conducted an ANA webinar, “Spin 1st-Party Data into Advertising Gold,” to help them get ready.
Lessons Learned
Our webinar applied the many lessons we’ve been learning as we’ve helped clients stop depending on third-party cookies and make better use of the most valuable data available to them – first-party data, or the information that people willingly share with them primarily on their websites and via opt-in email marketing.
A Team Effort Required
One of our main points was that businesses really should not wait around for third-party data to go away to learn how to manage their first-party data. There is no “Activate My First-Party Data” switch. Marketers need to marshal a team that includes information technology and security to sort out an effective strategy for developing a transparent first-party cookie tracking strategy that builds trust. If you stumble with the basic step of managing consent with the audience who visits your website or receives your emails, you’ve destroyed the entire purpose of applying first-party data before you’ve started.
But once you get consent through transparency, you can collect data efficiently. And with efficiency comes agility, or the ability to make real-time decisions about customers based on what you know about them. This, to us, is the key to spinning gold out of first-party data: setting yourself up to be agile with data.
But how do you develop a strategy? This was the core question our talk covered.
Developing a First-Party Data Strategy
The chart above illustrates a conversation we have with clients all the time about how to apply first-party data across paid media channels and tactics. The conversation goes something like this: the real value of first-party data is using it to create the kind of effective messaging across paid media channels that advertisers had wanted to do with third-party cookies all along – only better.
Targeting Enhancements: The Personal Touch
Targeting isn’t just about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people at the right time. By creating suppression lists, businesses can avoid advertising to those who have already converted or are not the intended audience, saving precious marketing dollars. Conversely, building look-a-like audiences allows you to find new customers who share characteristics with your best existing ones, effectively amplifying your reach. And when it comes to re-engaging customers, creating new retargeting lists from first-party data means your ads are seen by individuals who have already shown interest in your brand, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Customization Opportunities: The Creative Edge
By customizing ad copy and creative elements, businesses can speak more directly to the consumer’s needs, interests, and pain points. This tailored approach not only enhances relevance but also fosters a deeper connection between the brand and its audience. Similarly, customizing the campaign mix ensures that your marketing efforts are aligned with the unique journey of each customer, integrating across different touchpoints and platforms.
Enrich Research: The Insightful Approach
Building new audience profiles based on first-party data gives businesses more insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and patterns. This information can be used to inform everything from product development to personalized marketing strategies. Identifying seasonality and other data trends also enables businesses to anticipate changes in consumer behavior, staying one step ahead in the market.
Drive Quality Efficiencies: The Strategic Shift
Efficiency in advertising means not just reaching the target audience but converting them into paying customers. Implementing offline conversions tracking helps bridge the gap between online advertising and offline sales, providing a more complete picture of campaign effectiveness. Meanwhile, automating optimization opportunities means your campaigns are constantly refined in real-time (that nimbleness we spoke of earlier). This drives better results with less manual intervention. And lead scoring prioritizes leads based on their likelihood to convert, which ensures that sales teams are focusing their efforts where they are most likely to pay off.
Client Success
We are integrating first-party to drive a significant impact for many clients. For instance, a trucking company turned to us to scale their operations due to a high demand for hiring over 400 drivers weekly. The inefficiency in their recruitment marketing was twofold: a lack of a coherent channel tagging strategy and an over-reliance on manual reporting tasks that consumed over 10,000 hours each year.
We sought to streamline the hiring process through automating data for business and marketing efficiencies. This would not only save time but also reduce costs associated with media spend and manual data processing.
Our client first underwent a comprehensive campaign tagging workshop to establish a structured approach to channel tagging. This workshop aimed to optimize how data from various media channels was collected and utilized.
We also helped our client use APIs to funnel, process, join, and replicate their Applicant Tracking System (ATS) data with media platform insights. This integration meant that data became more accessible, and actionable insights could be drawn more swiftly and accurately. To do this, we are applying first-party data such as hire, driver, ATS data to inform campaign structure, optimization opportunities in platform and budget allocation.
And together we delivered results such as:
- Decreased media spend: The client saw a 55 percent decrease in media spend, indicating a much more efficient use of advertising budgets.
- Boosted ad engagement: There was a 26 percent increase in ad engagement, suggesting that the ads were better targeted and more relevant to the audience.
- Time saved: 8,000 hours were saved annually from manual data pulling tasks, freeing up resources for other strategic initiatives.
- Cost savings: the efficient reporting process translated into $150,000 saved on agency reporting time.
- Improved hiring ratio: there was a 22 percent increase in the lead to hire ratio, indicating a more effective recruitment process.
- Reduced costs per interaction: The cost per ad click decreased by 40 percent, and the cost per lead was reduced by 44 percent, showing improved efficiency in ad spend and lead generation.
By effectively using first-party data and automating its data processes, the client significantly improved its marketing and business efficiencies. The case clearly demonstrates the tangible benefits of integrating technology with first-party data to not only save time and money but also to enhance the overall performance of recruitment campaigns.
Takeaways
Our webinar covered more ground than what we’ve described above, but this post gives you a taste of it. We urged attendees to:
- Start now to prevent falling behind with first-party data integration and adoption. Don’t be one of the cautionary examples in the next Wall Street Journal article.
- Bridge IT and marketing teams to start having conversations around how to integrate data.
- Begin testing application of first-party data across channels and modify strategies based on results.
Learn how we customize campaigns for your success by applying performance marketing including first-party data. And take a deeper dive into data-driven strategies through analytics as well.