July 2024 – Connected Interactive

Maximize your Ad Revenue by Prioritizing Engaged Leads

MAXIMIZE YOUR AD REVENUE BY PRIORITIZING ENGAGED LEADS

Engaged leads and lifetime value create more profitable conversions compared to trying to drive down your CPA (cost per acquisition) too early and relying solely on last-click metrics.

Lessons from 25 Years in Advertising

In my 25 years in the advertising industry, I’ve seen many campaigns go off the rails by focusing too narrowly on CPA from the start. On the flip side, I’ve seen amazing results from campaigns that defined and focused on the stages of the customer journey to a qualified sale.

What is a Qualified Sale?

A qualified sale is when you acquire a customer who provides a high ROI based on their lifetime value. This ensures the best rate of return on your marketing efforts.

The Pitfalls of Focusing Solely on CPA to Early

Unless you’re already a big, trusted brand, focusing entirely on CPA too early can lead to a race to the bottom. You may end up acquiring lower-value customers who don’t cover the cost to acquire them. This can trap you in a cycle of lowering your CPA and diminishing your returns.

Additionally, you end up focusing all your attention on the lower funnel instead of ensuring your entire funnel or Pipeline remains healthy and keeping growing. When you do this the well runs dry cause you have not been filling it and you could end up in a place that’s impossible to come back from before you realize what you have done.

Why Engagement Matters

Think about it: Have you ever clicked on an ad for a new product and bought it immediately? Probably not. Most consumers click on an ad multiple times before committing to a purchase or providing their information. This is why focusing on engagement is crucial. Here’s why:

Qualified Customers: By focusing on those who show genuine interest, you build an audience of engaged leads. This is the quickest route to gathering quality data that you can optimize your campaign towards.

Behavioral Insights: Identifying visitors who engage with your product or site helps you understand their interest. Scaling this first fills your funnel with potential customers you can continue to engage and eventually convert. This is a healthy Pipeline or Funnel.

Scalable Data: This approach allows you to build robust models that you can optimize within channels like YouTube, Display, Video, and Social Media.

Optimizing for Engaged Leads

Optimizing for engaged leads ensures higher-quality customers with better long-term value. Engaged customers:

Have higher lifetime value.

Provide more meaningful feedback.

Contribute to a more robust and profitable sales funnel.

Measuring Long-Term Value

For long-term success, focus on a combination of engagement, efficient CPA, and lifetime value:

The Right CPA: For example, a $50 CPA for a customer who spends $1,000 has almost 10 times the ROI compared to a $10 CPA for a customer with a $100 lifetime spend. ROAS of $950 vs $90. Which customer would you rather acquire?

Beware of Last-Click Attribution

Using Google Analytics and only looking at the last click that drove the conversion can lead you astray. For instance, if you found users with great targeting solutions from Channel A but they converted through Channel B, Google Analytics might mislead you to cut out Channel A, which was actually crucial in the initial engagement and building a good lead pool.

Use Organic Lift as a Quality Measure

This is a great tool to measure the quality of conversions in the short term. By comparing lifts and dips in organic traffic, engagement, and conversions across different channels, you can gauge the quality of your traffic and whether your strategies will lead to long-term success and growth.

Final Thoughts

While CPA is a valuable metric, it shouldn’t be the sole focus of a campaign. By prioritizing engaged leads and using effective channel strategies and data across programmatic, social media, and video, you can drive more profitable sales and achieve long-term success.

Why Smart Data Buying is the Key to your Success in Programmatic

WHY SMART DATA BUYING IS THE KEY TO YOUR SUCCESS IN PROGRAMMATIC

Hey there! If you’re in the digital advertising game, you know how crucial it is to have a solid audience strategy. One of the biggest pieces of that puzzle is understanding how to buy data the right way. By focusing on data transparency and knowing exactly where your data comes from, you can supercharge your campaigns and cut down on wasted spending.

Lessons from the Trenches

Over the years, I’ve seen just about everything in this industry. One story that stands out involved a supplier who sold US credit card data to a partner running Canadian ads. Yep, you read that right. When we told them what they had been buying from another supplier for 2 years we had to pull in a VP from the cc company to prove to them what we already knew. This is a valuable lesson: always be vigilant and insist on transparency in data buying and pick your partners well. Lastly, support Canadian suppliers for Canada!

Understanding the Data Landscape

The programmatic and digital media buying world is full of options for buying consumer data. At first glance, all those targeting choices might seem like a dream come true. But, if you don’t scrutinize the data, you could end up paying for nothing. Understand the source of the data and how the audience was created. If something doesn’t make sense, ask more questions. As they say, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

Probabilistic vs. Deterministic Data

It’s also important to understand the difference between probabilistic and deterministic data.

Probabilistic data is like casting a wide net. It involves gathering data points from various sources and using data science to expand a small audience into a larger one. For example, you might start with a segment of 22,000 people and grow it to 1.5 million by finding similar profiles and using machine learning to identify other similar users.

On the other hand, deterministic data comes straight from the source and gives you exact user signals linked to specific actions. Think of it like intent data from search behaviors—people actively looking for what you offer, making them prime targets for your ads. Another good example is purchase data, which allows you to understand spending patterns at the level of your product.

Finding the Sweet Spot

Deterministic data is super precise but can be combined with probabilistic data to refine it into a more valuable audience.

For instance, blending deterministic transactional data with affinity or behavioral data (probabilistic) can create highly targeted audience segments. This mix helps you pinpoint the most valuable users within a larger group, ensuring your ads reach the right people for a great ROI while still being scalable.

Demand Transparency

Here’s a golden rule: always demand transparency about where your data comes from. If the data’s origin is murky or hard to understand, it’s probably not worth your investment. Quality data is the foundation of effective campaigns, allowing you to use AI tools and measurement techniques to optimize and continually improve your results.

Unlocking Programmatic Potential

Great audience data is your ticket to unlocking the full potential of programmatic advertising. By following smart data buying practices and insisting on transparency, you can drive growth, optimize your media spend, and achieve precise, large-scale targeting. This approach helps you avoid waste and maximize your ad spend return.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more tips and insights on making your programmatic strategies even better.

Supercharge Your Marketing with Lookalike Audiences

SUPERCHARGE YOUR MARKETING WITH LOOKALIKE AUDIENCES

Your Path to Scaled Success and Enhanced Engagement

After more than a decade in the trenches of digital advertising and adtech, I’ve had the privilege of watching this industry evolve and transform. I’ve seen firsthand how the right strategies can transform campaigns. One of the most powerful tools we have today is lookalike audiences and the ability to enhance them with 3rd party data. So, why is this approach essential for scaling your results and maximizing ROI? Let’s explore.

Harness the Power of Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences are crucial for enriching your user targeting strategy in digital marketing campaigns. They offer multiple benefits that can significantly boost your campaign performance:

Enhanced Targeting Precision: Reach new users similar to your existing high-value customers, reducing ad spend wastage.

Increased ROI: Higher likelihood of conversions, optimizing ad spend for better returns.

Expanded Campaign Reach: Enter new markets by targeting similar user segments.

Efficient Use of Data: Leverage existing customer data for informed targeting decisions.

Deeper Connection with Target Users: Deliver tailored, relevant ad messaging, improving user engagement and experience.

Continuous Campaign Improvement: Dynamically refine and update audiences based on new data and feedback.

Competitive Advantage: Gain an edge by effectively reaching potential customers before competitors.

Cross-Channel Consistency: Ensure a unified targeting strategy and brand messaging across multiple marketing channels.

Creation of Lookalike Audiences: Build from Quality Seed Data

Start with rich, scalable, and accurate seed data (e.g., hashed emails from your subscriber list). The quality of your lookalikes depends on the quality of your seed data. This data can feed directly into marketing platforms, helping you target users who resemble your best customers, driving campaign efficiencies and increasing ROI.

High Quality and Relevance: Direct user connection ensures specific and relevant data, containing high-quality information from engaged subscribers or customers.

Effective Targeting: Behavioral insights tied to user behaviors like purchase history and engagement. Customer segmentation allows for precise targeting based on user interactions.

Data Accuracy: Consistent updates by users maintain the accuracy and relevance of the email list.

Supercharging Lookalike Audiences

Enhance your lookalike audiences by blending them with additional behavioral signals, such as purchase data (e.g., Moneris transactional signals from Canada’s largest POS provider) or psychographic data (demographic, brand, and retail affinity). This approach, known as Audience Architecture, ensures you target users with the right behaviors for conversion.

Why is it Important to Further Enhance Lookalikes with Additional Quality Data?

While emails are powerful, combining them with other types of data can create even more effective lookalike audiences. Here are some data sources to consider:

Transactional Data:
- Purchase History: Identifies high-value customers based on buying patterns.
- POS Data: Adds depth to understanding customer behaviors.

Demographic Data:
- Age, Gender, Location: Helps understand broader customer characteristics.

Psychographic Data:
- Interests and Preferences: Provides insights into lifestyles and values for personalized targeting.
- Brand Affinity: Guides more effective audience creation.

Behavioral Data:
- Website and App Activity: Indicates user engagement and intent.
- Social Media Engagement: Highlights interests and behaviors of potential customers.

Life Lessons in Lookalike Audiences

Early in my career, I worked on a campaign for a client who was determined to lower their CPA at all costs. We focused heavily on minimizing expenses, only to find that our conversions were low-quality and often didn’t justify the cost. It was a classic race to the bottom.

In another instance, we used high-quality seed data from engaged customers for a different client. By creating lookalike audiences, we saw a significant improvement in engagement and conversions. The campaign’s success reaffirmed the importance of starting with quality data and focusing on user engagement.

Creating lookalike audiences from carefully sourced seed data and enhancing them through Audience Architecture is a powerful way to drive and scale results. By focusing on users with the right behaviors for conversion, you can maximize your marketing efforts and achieve significant growth.

One thing I’ve learned in my years in this industry is that the quality of your audience can make or break a campaign. Start with quality data, refine continuously, and always aim for deeper engagement. These strategies have helped my clients succeed time and again, and I’m confident they can work for you too. If you have any questions or need further insights, feel free to reach out.

Here’s to your marketing success!