You're (Probably) Missing Out
I'm often asked by publishers if there's something they could be doing to improve the performance of their advertisers campaigns. Yes, indeed, there are a lot of things you could be doing. There are some obvious things such as creative burnout. It's a real thing. We frequently see that banners will have impressive performance at the start and then after a few months it starts to taper off and level out. The same people (i.e. return visitors) get tired of seeing the same ads over and over. This is about the point where you should start considering some fresh creatives to help prevent so-called banner blindness.
But Wait... There's More
The thing is though, you can have the best creative in the world but if you're not putting it in front of the right people its performance is going to be lackluster.
People-Based Targeting
AdvertServe gives you plenty of options such as contextual targeting, geographic targeting, browser/os/device targeting and even weather targeting. These things are all great, but we must realize that we're targeting broad groups of people – not specific people within them. That is where LiveRamp comes into play. We can optimize for better performance by leveraging LiveRamp data to target those specific groups of people.
LiveRamp offers an impressive amount of data and it's growing every day. When we introduced LiveRamp to you about a year ago there were 47 data providers and 35,000 data segments. Today that number has grown to 104 data providers and over 82,000 data segments!
Do You Know Your Audience?
When I talk to publishers and tell them about LiveRamp they generally say, well, I don't need that because I already know my audience is interested in X, Y or Z. That may be true. However, not everyone in your audience is truly the same. Even at a very basic level they may be diverse in gender, age and income range despite sharing the same key interest that brought them to your site.
Example Scenario
Let's say, for example, that you publish a web site for car enthusiasts. You obviously know that anyone visiting your site is interested in cars. Naturally you will attract car manufacturers and dealerships to advertise on your site. Does it really make sense to advertise luxury cars such as a BMW i8 to your entire audience? Probably not because not everyone can afford a BMW i8 as much as they would like to be able to. The fact is that you're wasting impressions by showing such ads to visitors that aren't prospective buyers and that drives down click rates.
How can we solve that problem? We need to know the income range of your visitors to qualify them as potential luxury car buyers. To accomplish that we need data, lots of data, which is exactly what LiveRamp provides. Using their data you can target those BMW i8 ads to people with $150K or higher annual incomes. As a result you will most likely see improved click rates because those people are much more likely to be interested in the offer.
More Ideas
That's just one simple example, but the possibilities are almost endless with over 82,000 data segments. In fact, the list is so long it doesn't make sense to put the whole thing here. That's why we've built a great LiveRamp data browser with search right into the AdvertServe control panel so you can find the specific data segments you need to easily start targeting your campaigns more effectively. Just to give you a better idea though here's a list of some commonly used data segments:
- Profession
- Gender
- Age range
- Marital status
- Households with children
- Income range
- Home value range
- Net worth range
- Nationality
- Spoken languages
- Interests and hobbies
- Lifestyles
- Pet owners
- Brand of cars owned
Low Impression Dilemma
This level of precision targeting does have one drawback, which is that it can significantly restrict impression delivery. Although that is kind of the point to do more with less. You'll be able to deliver the same number of clicks with less impressions, which means you can justify a higher CPM rate for them. Plus the impressions you're not wasting on unqualified buyers can be put to good use for other campaigns and further increase your earnings.
Keep in mind that you also don't need to utilize LiveRamp targeting for an entire campaign. What you can do is create a parent campaign with two child campaigns. One of those child campaigns can be targeted to run of site. The other can be run of site as well, but you'll run it with LiveRamp targeting and a higher chain. That ensures you're still getting a good number of impressions, but at the same time you're optimizing performance by capitalizing on the high-value people you really want to reach.
It can also be attractive and helpful to create products around these concepts. You can pitch this sort of deal as a combination of a brand recognition campaign and a high-impact campaign. The run of site campaign creates brand recognition while the data-targeted campaign yields results.
Want to learn more?
Please feel free to contact support and we'd be happy to give you a walk through and talk more about how LiveRamp can work for you.
You might also like this article, which highlights 13 Sweet Identity Resolution Use Cases that some LiveRamp users are implementing to take their people-based marketing to the next level.
Mike Cherichetti
