How Exact Audience Validation Can Hone Your Targeting

When it comes to the success of an ad campaign, the difference between a ‘direct hit’ and a ‘complete miss’ is attributed to one of four things: poor planning, execution, adjustment or measurement.  

Audience targeting is one of these variables contributing to campaign success. But it’s unusual because it plays an important role throughout all stages – from planning to measurement.

As they may or may not be aware, many brands aren’t maximizing the effectiveness of their campaigns, leading to wasted budget and resource.

Audience targeting validation is the antidote to the ad waste epidemic.

It allows brands to adjust campaigns in-flight with confidence, and ultimately prove their impact.

It builds a spine that runs through a campaign ensuring a solid foundation, and all parts move in the right direction.

Inaccurate targeting is more damaging than you think

Missing the mark when it comes to audience targeting has a number of impacts, both within the business itself in terms of wasted budget and time (not to mention lowered morale) but also on consumer opinion.

Wasting ad spend.

Unless your brand is a huge multinational with an unlimited marketing budget, the likelihood is that funds will be tight and wasted spend meticulously monitored.

This places a lot of pressure on marketing teams, both in-house and agency-side, to ensure ROI. So basing the action of a campaign on a hunch or inaccurate data is risky.

Instead, making use of trusted validation technology that provides consistent results is a better policy.

The most common reasons for inaccurate audience targeting are:

• Outdated or legacy research – from existing campaigns or audience analysis carried out previously.
• Gut feeling outranking data – ‘this is who we’ve always targeted and it’s what we know’.
• Inaccurate data sources – not all data sources are made equal.
• Oversimplification – building an incomplete audience persona means missing out on key facets about who your audience is.

Any of these ring true?

The damaging effects of poor targeting spider into other aspects of the campaign planning and execution setting, underwhelming benchmarks and slowing the development of your overall marketing strategy.   

Damaging your reputation.

Users are becoming more sensitive to irrelevant ads, meaning marketers should focus on matching the accuracy of targeting with the quality of the message.

In order to gain the desired effect from your target consumer, these two elements must work in harmony. Otherwise, consumers could respond negatively.

48% of internet users used an ad-blocker last month.

With users actively rejecting irrelevant ads, not only are many brands missing the mark and wasting spend, they’re also at risk of ostracizing a group that could become a target in the future.

How does audience targeting validation work?

It starts by establishing who has been exposed to your online advertising, confirming that you’re reaching your desired audience.

Once you have this, it’s about understanding and defining these consumers to get your messaging on point, focusing on the customer insights that can drive meaningful creativity.

Our solution gives the capabilities you can’t find elsewhere, to make sure you’re hitting the mark.

Let’s break audience targeting validation down to understand what you can do:

• See the whole picture with robust data.

Using cookie-based technology, it’s possible to match those exposed to your online advertising to those who have completed a detailed survey from a global panel of internet users.

This allows those exposed to be extensively profiled.

• Make it reliable.

Those who are exposed to an ad are analyzed against a matched control sample. In both cases, all groups see an identical survey and the impact is assessed for complete accuracy.

• Get a multi-platform view.

Our digital measurement capabilities enable you to track your campaign across PCs, mobiles and tablet browsers , including by key creatives, site or targeting method. We can also track in-app performance.

• Understand your true and potential reach.

We can provide estimated reach to quantify the absolute number of consumers influenced by any campaign.

What we track: step by step

Technology that enables brands to target exact audiences with the right messaging and validate their reach and effectiveness is relatively new.

But how does this work in practice? Here’s our the step-by-step tracking process:

1. A consumer takes part in a survey, willingly answering questions on their attitudes, perceptions and online behaviors.
2. When taking the survey, this person is tagged with a cookie.
3. This cookie tracks when the survey-taker naturally visits (or is exposed to) the tagged digital property attributed to a campaign.
4. The technology connects this behavior to wider truths gathered from the survey data to give a more detailed picture of the types of people exposed to the ad.

Prove your impact with survey data

We’ve all heard the phrase, ‘work smarter not harder’. This certainly applies to audience research.

The key to success doesn’t lie in the quantity of research carried out, more important is the quality of data available and the insights gathered from it.

Survey data helps bolster your audience intelligence by analyzing what you know to be true of them, to determine the actual behaviors and perceptions of the people you’re reaching.

Next-generation analytics help you understand how your marketing is making a difference to your brand, and where your potential lies.

Connecting the world’s largest panel of digital consumers with advanced tagging technology, you can go far beyond age and gender, profiling your consumers across all digital media, with first-party, psychographic data you can trust.

Case study: How Fullsix honed Tequila Avion’s audience targeting

The challenge

Building awareness of Tequila Avion amongst multiple target groups, through traditional media, in a highly competitive environment.

With low brand awareness across the U.S., the brand wanted to develop a campaign that that elevated their profile, allowing them to compete against deep-pocketed competitors.

The action

Fullsix, an integrated data, media and creative agency was tasked with delivering an awareness campaign amongst Tequila Avion’s key markets.

They stayed true to their craft and built a data-driven audience model using the tools available.

While Tequila Avion had an idea of their target audience segments, and the channels through which to reach them, it was Fullsix who sought to gain a deeper understanding of the people they were trying to reach, and what shape the campaign should take.

This level of analysis persuaded the teams not to limit themselves to traditional media in an effort to round out the consumer journey.

The result

The team used the analytics solutions offered by GlobalWebIndex to analyze the overall effectiveness of their campaign on the exact same audience they used for their original modeling.

This meant they could get an accurate reading of what actually worked, and equally, what didn’t.

“In the case of Avión, the people we planned against were the people we measured against”, says Seinn Schlidt, Director of Strategy at Fullsix.

Achieving a brand lift across all key objectives, the team reached their desired goals against the odds, increasing both awareness and consideration among their target audience.

Read the full case study here.