Despite fears of a global recession, 89% of CMOs and marketing leaders say they’re planning to increase their marketing investments in the coming year, with 44% expecting those increases to be substantial.
But investments alone aren’t enough. Today’s digital advertising efforts require more power to break through—and that power can be delivered by trusted sources of high-quality third-party data. Let’s take a look at real-world examples of how this powerful combination is delivering improved ROI for brands across a wide array of verticals.
By layering high-quality, insightful audience profiles onto an online media buy, brands have the opportunity to reduce costs while increasing reach.
For example, a global financial services company was looking for people interested in applying for auto loans. The company’s research showed that its target audience is often early tech adopters, so it created a campaign to attract this group. It then worked with its data provider to identify an audience profile composed of early tech adopters and online shoppers interested in electronics retailers. When the company activated the campaign and ran it across the open web via Google DV360, it was able to reduce its cost per landing page view by 78% and double its average clickthrough rate.
The ability to leverage third-party data to enhance performance is particularly evident when used in a cross-channel capacity.
For example, an international bank launched a product designed for high-net worth individuals but was having trouble driving its target audience to its website’s promotional pages. So, it turned to its data partner to create a custom audience segment that could help it target and acquire high-quality leads through programmatic advertising campaigns. To promote the new product, the bank activated the new profiles for cross-channel lead generation advertising campaigns across programmatic display and social channels. Across platforms, the custom audience profile reduced the cost per lead by 11%, with Google delivering an impressive 89% decrease in cost per lead.
Often, marketers find that targeting strategies that worked in the past might lose steam and fail to deliver the needed ROI over time. When this happens, tapping into third-party data and insights can get campaigns back on track.
For example, a home appliance manufacturer had been using the same targeting strategy for some time and needed to reinvigorate its campaigns and improve performance. The brand worked with its agency and data partner to select audience traits and build a specialized segment that captured customers interested in cooking and baking and who intended to purchase a dishwasher. Compared to other campaigns, the ones using the custom segment saw a staggering 33% increase in click-through rates, a 30% decrease in CPM and a 35% decrease in CPC.
Custom, predictive audience data is also invaluable when it comes to boosting b-to-b performance and ROI.
For example, a multinational technology brand wanted to find new ways to reach its IT and developer target audience while increasing scale at an efficient CPM. The company worked with its agency and data provider to activate a b-to-b predictive audience solution based on privacy-friendly contextual signals. Providing a combination of high scale with strong efficiencies, the solution drove a $341 cost-per-efficient-view (CPEV) against the company’s benchmark CPEV of $475. Due to the excellent Q1 performance, the tech brand extended its targeting campaign into Q2. The predictive audience solution further improved the company’s CPEVs across campaigns (25% decrease) and outperformed its contextual audiences ($252 vs. $330).
Digital advertising offers tremendous potential for significant (and, importantly, highly measurable) ROI. But it’s also an incredibly crowded space. That’s why in 2023, simply investing in digital advertising isn’t going to be enough. To truly break through, marketers need to be earmarking spend for concurrent data investments that can help them ensure every dollar spent delivers maximum impact.
This article was first published by Adweek.