The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown
For marketers, there are three kinds of data.
There’s good data, full of insights, ready and waiting to plan your next creative campaign.
There’s bad data, full of bots, click fraud, and a host of other invalid traffic sources that renders it unusable.
Then there’s unknown data – valuable insights ‘black-boxed’ away from marketers’ pleading eyes by the big players for no apparent reason other than it generally being accepted as ‘the cost of business’.
In percentage terms, ‘good’ (20%) and ‘bad’ (20%) split the leftovers once ‘unknown’ (60%) has swallowed its eyewatering piece of the data pie.
And this inequality of insightful data makes customer attribution more difficult than it should be.
For years, marketers have been able to figure workarounds to this problem, thanks mainly in part to third-party cookies. But with Google’s product ad announcement of a move towards a ‘privacy-first web’ and Apple’s iOS update requiring Apple users to specifically opt-in to targeted ads, finding ways to measure insights, and refine target audiences, has become a lot harder.
At this point, it’s important for brands not to panic. There are still ways and means of doing it. It often just means looking for them in a different place.
So where do you look? Watch the webinar to find out.
Fly in the Ointment
Another problem facing marketers because of the reduction of insights is the reliance on the 20% ‘good’ data.
This is fine, but it must be clean and verified as authentic. If it contains any invalid traffic, “marketers risk chucking money away at each stage of their marketing funnel as the same data is reused for retargeting campaigns,” says Lewis.
Filtering out bad traffic removes downstream costs, gets you closer to your ideal customer profile (ICP), and leads to activity that converts.
This is elaborated further within the video.
What You Can Do
It’s a difficult moment in time for marketers, but also an exciting one, depending on your outlook. So what can you do to keep up with the ever-evolving ad landscape?
There are three main things to consider. Check out the webinar to hear Amar, Peter and Lewis discuss:
- Why it’s best to use a multichannel approach – using social platforms to generate intent and Google to capture it, avoiding ‘curiosity clicks’ that don’t convert
- The importance of first-party and zero-party data and how brands can harness it to provide a better service to customers, therefore capturing more data insights
- How to make the most of tech that helps to unlock some of the ‘black box’ insights
