The efficiency & effectiveness of using 3rd party audiences in your targeting strategy

A Data Management Platform (DMP) is software that stores, organizes, and interprets customer and ad data from a variety of sources, this allows businesses to gain insights and create marketing tactics (such as building audience lists) to develop more effective campaign performance.

Further to this, 3rd party data collection involves working with an external partner to purchase these insights to leverage the data from these various sources, empowering and incorporating an organisation’s 1st party data to provide a more complete picture of the customer journey.

Importantly, there are a range of benefits that can be achieved from using 3rd party data and working with a 3rd party DMP partner, however, the better quality an organisation’s 1st party data, the more powerful leveraging this external data can be.

Specifically, 3rd party data provides an additional level of granularity and precision to your organisation’s audience strategy, giving visibility to additional information that is not captured (and may not ever be captured) by an organisation’s 1st party data.

According to Oracle, there are a number of specific benefits that can be achieved through a Data Management Platform (DMP) as well as through a 3rd party DMP, including:

With the increase in granularity and precision that comes from insights generated from a 3rd party DMP, you are able to create a more specific, personalised and advanced level of targeting within your ad buys, leading to more effective and efficient advertising.

This additional, advanced segmentation of audiences allows for targeting through the use of Data-Driven Creative. With research from Google Media Lab confirming that 70% of campaign performance is down to creative, being able to apply a data-driven approach allows you to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of your campaign performance and the returns they generate.

Along with the power you can leverage from integrating your 1st party data throughout the Google Marketing Platform, this effect is amplified when also integrating 3rd party data from a DMP, creating visibility of your target audience across the customer journey. Research cited from Think with Google also backs up the power of having a complete picture of the journey, with Marketing leaders being 1.5X more likely to say their organisations currently have a clear understanding of their customers’ journeys across channels and devices. An important consideration is to ensure you are working with a best-in-class DMP partner that is able to help ‘fill in’ any gaps your organisation has of its target customers.

With budget and demonstrating ROI considered the most important for CEOs and CMOs in terms of developing Digital Marketing Maturity, according to ‘Marketing 2025, The future of skills and technology in marketing across Australia and New Zealand’ from Marketo, the increased effectiveness and efficiency that is achieved from having a more complete picture of the customer journey and applying Data-Driven Creative within your ad buying will also ultimately lead to more effective utilisation of marketing budget.

Leveraging the power of 3rd party data from a DMP provider is also important from a Digital Marketing Maturity perspective, in particular, throughout the ‘Connected’ stage of your audience strategy. By applying a Digital Marketing Maturity mindset to your data, audience strategy and methodology, this will allow you to drive your organisation’s audience strategy to multi-moment with more advanced architecture and segmentation. This means your marketing efforts will be optimised for more one-to-one, personalised experiences across the customer journey for target customers.

With the ongoing shift of consumer use of mobile, leveraging the power of data attributes from a mobile DMP can be a particularly effective strategy, with virtually an unlimited number of data attributes to use for creating more effective and efficient targeting in the Google Marketing Platform.

While Google has plenty of behavioural and intent data to leverage within the GMP, 3rd party data providers like Alike Audience can provide consent-based data attributes to enhance your GMP targeting abilities (and achieve up to 70% reach) and can enhance your ability to target B2B audiences.

Coming from a Mobile DMP, this type of audience targeting is based on mobile device IDs (not cookies) which are personally identifiable (which Google does not allow), meaning there will be no impact from the removal of 3rd party cookies or individual users changing browsers or their privacy settings. This type of multi-moment advertising is important in achieving Digital Marketing Maturity, particularly in Asia where mobile is more popular than desktop, to reach your audience at the right time, with the right messaging.

With recent privacy concerns along with the removal of the 3rd party cookies, ensuring you have reliable, trustworthy and consent-based audience data becomes extremely valuable in differentiating yourself from competitors and converting prospects to customers.

Whether you’re new to 3rd party data or already working with a 3rd party DMP partner, the research shows that incorporating 3rd party data within your audience strategy strongly contributes to the Digital Marketing Maturity of your organisation, allowing more advanced audience building to complement 1st party data and create precise, granular audiences to target with Data-Driven Creative. In turn, this will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your targeting, data and view of the customer journey.

For support or consultation on your data strategy or if you would like to leverage 3rd party data within your Google Marketing Platform audience strategy, please get in touch with the FiveStones today.