AdTech - Digital Element

7 Tips for Improving Your Marketing with IP Data

Posted on September 14, 2021November 11, 2024 by Digital Element

This is an uncertain time for marketers. Apple and Mozilla have blocked third-party tracking in their browsers, and Google has announced plans to follow suit. What does this mean for the future of data-driven marketing? Will you have the tools to home in on your exact audience and to measure campaign success?

The answer is a resounding yes for a simple reason: Not all data stems from third-party cookies. For instance, ubiquitous and persistent, IP data is highly valuable to marketers, and can be leveraged to improve targeting, assess inventory quality (e.g. detect fraudulent impressions), drive campaign performance, and attribute business outcomes to specific channels.

And when used in conjunction with your first-party data or other privacy-compliant data sets, IP data provides rich profiles of users at a very granular level.

Here are seven tips for leveraging IP data to enhance your initiatives as we move forward into a privacy-centric world.

Tip #1: Make data a priority at your organization/build a data-driven culture

Data will always be the key to better understanding who your prospects and customers are, segmenting them into distinct personas, as well as gaining insight into their customer journeys.

IP data is especially helpful in improving targeting, attribution, and analysis while complying with existing and emerging privacy regulations. For instance, you can leverage IP addresses to uncover quite a bit of insight about your audiences, including their geolocation (country, city, postal code), whether they’re a home or business user, if their IP is associated with a suspicious proxy connection, their business name, and more.

These data points will help you ensure you’re targeting the right audience, as well as assess the markets that deliver the most success for your campaign and products.

Tip #2: Discuss your company’s objectives to determine the type of data you’ll need to meet them

The types of data you’ll need for your marketing initiatives and advertising campaigns will be driven by your company’s key objectives. For instance, if your goal is to verify that your advertising spend reached real humans and not bots, you’ll need to analyze geolocation data and other parameters so that you can detect fraudulent ad clicks. If your goal is to verify ad quality, you’ll need to audit ad clicks to ensure ads were served to the correct segment.

Specific datasets are available to help you hone a variety of use cases, from improving the customer experience with localized content, to better understanding the customer experience so you can refine your operations.

Tip #3: Examine which data you currently collect and integrate (or not) to identify gaps that need filling

Most companies have been building their pools of first-party data gathered from multiple customer touchpoints, including their websites, social media, campaign landing pages, customer care portal and so on. While these touchpoints provide a plethora of data, they don’t always provide the full context you need. If you’re not also leveraging IP data you will inevitably confront gaps in your insights, which can negatively affect your initiatives.

IP data enables you to:

Gain detailed and nuanced insights that you can deploy to improve campaign metrics. For instance, you can target audiences by geolocation and other data to improve results. Let’s say you’re a brick-and-mortar store and your campaign goal is to drive in-store foot traffic. IP data lets you answer the question: what is the optimal distance from an outlet to encourage in-store visits by new customers?
Create hyper-localized segments for targeting and analysis purposes. Based on real-time results, you can optimize your campaign criteria to drive conversions and efficiency in media spend (i.e. focus on the channels and day parts that deliver the highest engagement).
Manage distribution of online content, ensuring that licensing and agreements are adhered to, and that the right customer or prospect is always presented with the right content.

These are just a few of the ways that IP data can be deployed; there are many others.

Tip #4: Determine breadth and depth of the datasets needed

IP data is highly varied and provides you with many options. The breadth and depth of the datasets you’ll need will be driven by your business needs. Some of your available options include:

VPN & Proxy Identification	This data helps you to detect and prevent malicious IP address masking, and enables greater control over the distribution of your digital content.
Carrier Data	This data enables stronger targeting of mobile users based on ISP, mobile carrier, mobile country code, and mobile network code information.
Additional Insights from Extended Databases	These datasets provide a wealth of insight into users, and their likely interest in a product at a specific moment in time. For instance, a user may have little interest in a CPG product while at the office, but a keen interest while at home. These extended databases include: Autonomous System Number (i.e. routing prefixes) Demographics Language Time Zone Domain Name Organization Name SIC/NAICS Codes Home/Business types Core Based Statistical Area (CBSA)
Location Data	Location data helps you make strategic decisions in the online world. For example, it affects the way you price and promote your products; it shapes the way you reach out to your target audiences; it is used to analyze the attributes of consumers within a particular area; and it places restrictions on the way you conduct business due to laws and regulations in a given area.

Tip # 5: Evaluate whether or not you need to bring in a data partner

The best way to assess whether or not you need a data partner is to ask yourself very specific questions:

Do you have access to the full range of data that you’ll need to:
Deliver highly localized content
Verify ad spend
Optimize advertising yield
Perform robust analytics
Ensure legal compliance
Prevent fraud and enhance security
Network routing to optimize content delivery
And more…

Does your team understand all of the use cases and potential applications of the data?

If you’ve answered no to any of these questions, it’s likely you will need a data partner.

Tip #6: Conduct due diligence on data partner in terms of data quality, accuracy, reliability, updates, customer support, and ease of deployment

The goal of due diligence is to whittle down potential vendors to consider. You can conduct quite a bit of your due diligence prior to contacting any vendors.

Ultimately, you want a partner who is an established industry leader, deploys unparalleled data collection practices, excellent methodologies for classifications, and has formed strategic partnerships with external or third-party data providers to enhance the data.

When conducting due diligence, ask:

What industry firsts (i.e. innovations) can the company claim? You want a data provider that’s a pioneer in the industry, and can respond to emerging trends and opportunities in time to provide you with a competitive advantage.
Do they hold patents? Patents are a sign that the company has a culture of innovation, and it means you’ll get access to high-quality, trusted data
What is the breadth of the data? Is it global? Digital Element is the only provider that has accurate, global postcode-level coverage, as well as zip+4 in the U.S. The benefit of digital targeting is that it allows you to home in on your entire audience, but you can’t do that without access to accurate data on a global scale.
Is this company the “gold standard” of its sector? You want to partner with the best quality, most forward-thinking data provider as you move forward in the privacy-centric world.

Tip #7: Vet vendors

At the end of your due diligence process you’ll have a list of vendors under consideration. Now it’s time to vet them so that you can make the best decision for your needs.

Proper vetting requires you to ask very specific questions, as the results of your initiatives will only be as good as the quality of the data you use.

Specific questions to ask include:

How do you collect data? Is it anonymous and inherently privacy compliant? Do you collect PII data that must ultimately be scrubbed out? Do you store personal data?
How often is your data refreshed? There’s no sense in targeting users who’ve already converted or sent signals they’re not interested in an advertised product or service. For this reason, Digital Element’s data is updated 24/7 and released weekly.
How is your data validated?
How accurate is your data in terms of percentage of audience?
How easily can your data be deployed? Will my company be able to integrate it into our systems quickly and easily?
Are you willing to collaborate with us? Answer questions for our clients?

The world of data is changing for marketers, but in many ways, it is changing for the better. With the right partner, and the right datasets, marketers can thrive and win new customers in the emerging privacy-centric environment.

Create a Competitive Advantage for Account-Based Marketing With Precise Data

Posted on August 4, 2021November 11, 2024 by jsisko

The “spray and pray” B2B marketing strategy was already on a death spiral even before COVID-19. With the pandemic eliminating in-person events and conferences as well as face-to-face sales calls, B2B marketers increasingly turned to account-based marketing (ABM) to fill in that void.

ABM—focusing your marketing and sales efforts on precisely targeting just those accounts that are most likely to be purchasers of your product—has been around now for many years so the concept is not entirely novel.

According to the “Account-based Marketing – Global Market Trajectory & Analytics” Report, growth in ABM is taking place worldwide. The global market for account-based marketing is projected to reach $1.6 billion by 2027. The ABM market in the United States alone reached more than $202 million last year. Other noteworthy geographic regions poised for growth include China, Japan, Canada, and Germany.

Additional research shows that approximately 94 percent of B2B marketers have some type of active ABM program. B2B sales forces across all industries are prime for ABM, including financial services, enterprises, healthcare, manufacturing, IT, and SaaS companies to name a few.

It’s clear that ABM has become an important tool in the business-development arsenal. However, finding the right B2B data and turning that into actionable insights to fine-tune your audience targeting is sometimes a challenge.

Determining Your Data Needs

One dataset does not make an ABM program successful. In order to identify, understand and engage the ideal buyers at the right companies, it takes a combination of B2B datasets. Among them:

Customer data: The historical customer data within your CRM, billing systems and other databases;
Firmographics: Company operational information that includes financials, number of employees, industries served and corporate locations;
Technographics: Insight into the company’s current technology investments as well as its potential future IT needs; and
Third-party data: Any data from sources outside your company channels.

B2B IP Data Adds Much-Needed Context

IP addresses are particularly accurate in reaching audiences in a privacy-sensitive manner based on their place and context of access to the internet. An IP address can provide other data parameters outside of where an online user is located.

IP data gives B2B marketers an increased ability to discover and understand who is interested in their products and services, and to better target those prospects with the right messages, at the right time.

However, not all IP data providers are created equal. B2B marketers as well as ABM agencies and solution providers should look for reliable and global IP datasets to successfully power their account-based marketing programs—throughout the customer lifecycle.

Sample B2B IP datasets include:

Company Name
Domain Name
Geolocation (to a postcode level)
Home vs. Business
Internet Service Provider (ISP)
Organization Name

Create a New Dimension for Your Account-Based Marketing

Adding IP data to your B2B targeting base will allow your company to improve the way in which it discovers and interacts with B2B prospects online. Below are a few examples of how other organizations are adding a new dimension to their ABM programs with the addition of B2B IP data:

Enrich CRM

A leading customer relationship management platform uses B2B IP data to enrich its CRM offerings.

Create Audience Segments

The leading provider of B2B intent data uses IP intelligence to create addressable audience segments.

Enhance ABM platforms

A leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics incorporates B2B IP data to enhance its account-based-experience and visitor-intelligence platforms.

Target Buyers at Work

A heavy-equipment manufacturer uses IP data to target buyers for commercial construction companies with relevant online ads while they’re at work.

ABM Is Here to Stay

Account-centric marketing efforts have become a significant source of revenue for B2B companies. Those with mature programs can attribute as much as 73 percent of total revenues to their ABM initiatives. With these types of revenue-generating numbers, ABM will continue to be an integral part of biz-dev strategies, even as the business world returns to normal with its face-to-face meetings and in-person networking events.

It does take a significant amount of time and financial investment in order to jumpstart a successful ABM program. Do your due diligence when it comes to the data you use. Reliable and broad coverage; intelligent application of diverse datasets; and timely audience insights create the competitive advantage that ABM programs need to be successful.

Targeting and Trust Series: Part Three – Using IP Geolocation to Overcome Marketing Challenges

Posted on May 5, 2021November 11, 2024 by jsisko

We are continuing the “Targeting and Trust” series of blog posts this month, dedicated to why IP-based geolocation data is well positioned to deliver both the accurate targeting digital marketers need for improved response rates and the trust consumers crave in terms of personalized promotions without intrusion.

The third installment of our five-part blog series examines how IP geolocation technology helps digital marketers overcome many of the challenges they face every day. In Part One of our series, we referenced a series of challenges that digital marketers are now facing in the marketplace—many a direct byproduct of the pandemic.

Here we’ll look in more detail at each of these challenges and explore how IP-based geolocation offers a solution.

Low Response Rates

It’s open knowledge that click-through rates (CTRs) are low—and are getting lower. The first internet banner had a 10-percent CTR. Today, the rate is around 0.05 percent. Geo-targeting reverses this trend by offering relevant content, which generates a much better response. Real use cases show CTRs as much as tripling with the use of IP-geolocation data.

Falling Inventory Prices

Just as CTRs have fallen, so, too, have inventory prices. Again, geotargeted ads buck that trend. Typically, advertising delivered through geotargeting commands a 30- to 40-percent premium over non-targeted ads.

Cookies

Placing a cookie on a user’s browser lets a brand follow that user around the web. Abuse of the cookie is the original “creepy” ad-tech innovation. And, it is the big casualty of the new era of data privacy. Even Google is phasing it out.

Brands and advertisers need an alternative that supports personalization, but avoids intrusion. Many are experimenting with fingerprinting. However, some believe this technique to be as invasive as the cookie.

The removal of cookies should breathe new life into the IP address, which is ubiquitous and instant. An IP address can provide location and other user insights in real time—without yielding any personal information.

Privacy

In recent years, consumers have become increasingly active in speaking up when it comes to the use and protection of their personal information. The result? We’re seeing a rise in the utilization of tools such as ad blockers and virtual private networks (VPNs). Today, respect for privacy is such a consumer hot button that Apple is basing campaigns around it.

Consumers might reject creepy tracking methods, but they still respond best to personalized advertising, promotions and messages. Geotargeting offers marketers a privacy-sensitive solution they can be confident in to provide valuable insights into online traffic. Moreover, premium IP data can detect proxy, VPN and Tor traffic.

For marketers, in particular, the inclusion of proxy information in their data arsenals works to improve efficiency and performance of content and message through: 1) Avoiding wasted impressions; 2) Fighting click fraud; and 3) Enhancing attribution and analytics. Research suggests that 28 percent of website traffic has shown strong “non-human signals.” Where there’s non-human traffic, there’s certainly the potential for ad fraud.

Click Fraud

And speaking of ad fraud…the key to detecting it is to know more about who (or what) the ”clicker” is. Why is this important? Because the fraudster is usually trying to assume the identity of a legitimate consumer. Obviously, fraudsters use all manner of techniques to hide their identities—and to steal others.

IP-based geolocation gives brands a tool for spotting these scams by:

Revealing traffic surges from areas outside a campaign’s target zone;
Filtering out clicks from regions where services aren’t available;
Flagging account access from unusual or high-fraud areas;
Showing where traffic is coming from, such as proxies, which might indicate fraud;
And so much more.

Companies can then use this type of insight to reduce click fraud.

We live in the age of tailored, targeted, programmatic advertising that delivers relevant, timely messaging to consumers. The relevance of that messaging is dependent on good data. Much of the simple IP-based data that has previously been available to digital marketers has been inconsistent and inaccurate. By deploying more innovative, industry-leading IP geolocation data, digital marketers can overcome a myriad of challenges they face today through the use of more robust and reliable location-based advertising strategies.

In Part Four of this series, we’ll compare the realities and limits of IP geolocation data.

Targeting and Trust Series: Part Two – Options for Location-Based Advertising

Posted on April 6, 2021November 11, 2024 by jsisko

This month, we continue the “Targeting and Trust” series of blog posts dedicated to why IP-based geolocation data is well positioned to deliver both the accurate targeting digital marketers need for improved response rates and the trust consumers crave in terms of personalized promotions without intrusion.

The second installment of our five-part blog series focuses on the options that digital marketers have if they want to develop more localized advertising campaigns.

Location data has grown into a reliable tool for marketers who have learned to use it in their customer segmentation, analytics, attribution and targeting. To display location-based advertising and content, you need to know where a consumer is.

So, what are the options if marketers want to “go local”? There are many ways to do this.

Here are the main geotargeting data options:

User-Supplied

Sometimes you can just ask consumers for their location information. They can fill in a form to declare their whereabouts. However, this is the real world. Most consumers lack the time or the will to do this. And, even if they do, then the information is not always accurate—and can go out of date quickly.

Cookies

A cookie on someone’s browser can store previously entered location details. However, this is only true when the person actually supplies this information (see above). He or she might also clear the cookie cache at any point. Finally, of course, the cookie’s days are numbered. Browser companies are phasing them out.

GPS

Every smartphone supports GPS. The technology can be accurate to within a few feet. That sounds great, but again, GPS data is only available when mobile users agree to share it. Most don’t because of privacy or battery-life concerns. GPS is also application based (not browser based). Together, these two factors drastically limit how many users a brand can expect to target using GPS.

HTML5

HTML5-based mobile sites can collect some location information from visitors. However, visitors have to agree to this. Not to mention, their permissions expire after one session. As a result, HTML5 is very limited in terms of reaching an addressable audience.

IP Geolocation

IP geolocation technology uses an IP address to determine where a user is located. Everyone and everything connecting to a website is assigned an IP address. There is no connectivity without one. As an example, even a smart refrigerator has its own IP address.

An IP address is made up of a series of numbers. It can be used to identify location and other connection attributes, such as the type of device and the network it is connected to. The number includes:

The Internet Service Provider’s (ISP’s) name
The ISP’s host name
County/region/state/city

But that’s not all. An IP address can produce other properties that support even better targeting. These include 4G, 5G and Wi-Fi connections, or whether devices are on a corporate or home network. An IP address can also reveal connection speed. All of these extra attributes can help brands personalize—and localize—their goods or services.

Finally, here is what an IP address does not reveal:

A person’s name
An exact street address
A phone number
An email address

As stated in Part One of our series, the absence of this personally identifiable information (PII) protects a consumers’ privacy.

One marketing tactic that has been missing in the online world is the ability to effectively reach out to consumers without first asking for something in return. For example, in the current e-business world, for users to receive information that matches their unique tastes, they are required to give away a piece of themselves in the form of PII such as name, age, etc. And, more often than not, consumers are unwilling to part with such valuable—and personal—information for fear that it will be mishandled or sold to a third party.

By incorporating IP data into marketing initiatives, companies can improve the way they prospect for, acquire and retain customer relationships.

In Part Three of this series, we’ll delve into how IP geolocation technology helps digital marketers overcome challenges they face every day.

The New Reality of Digital Advertising in a Cookieless World: A Conversation with Digital Element’s Rob Friedman

Posted on March 5, 2020November 11, 2024 by jsisko

Ad tech industry discussions around the death of third-party cookies which track users for targeted advertising have been going on for some time now. Cookies have already been removed from Safari and Mozilla. However, the recent announcement regarding Google Chrome phasing out its support of third-party cookies over the next two years has brought us closer to the new reality of digital advertising in a cookieless world.

Here, we talk to Rob Friedman, Digital Element’s co-founder and executive vice president. For more than two decades, he’s worked closely with advertising and marketing businesses across the spectrum to ensure that they are getting the most out of their targeting solutions. He’s seen the industry evolve over those years to meet new marketplace demands―which, in turn, are driven by ever-changing consumer preferences in terms of how they want to engage with brands. When he speaks, you should listen.

What is your opinion on Google’s recent plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome within the next two years?

First and foremost, anything that furthers user privacy is a good thing. We started this company more than 20 years ago with an eye toward user privacy and making sure people were not scared off the internet. At that time cookies were first coming into play, and people were worried about companies spying on their browsing behaviors.

We thought there had to be a better way to target. People don’t behave the same if they know they are being tracked. However, if they know there is some value exchange (i.e. special discounts, personalized information, etc.), then they are more willing to give up some information. We think tracking without providing anything of value or without affirmative consent is the wrong approach.

Plus, it’s tough to have one company, for example Google, be in control of everything. For practical reasons, you can’t make the whole ad ecosystem dependent on one company. And, in the case of a data breach, that’s a single point of failure. You also miss the whole air of transparency.

Digital Element has been at the forefront of the online ad targeting industry since 1999 with its IP Intelligence data. What role will your data have now in a world without cookies?

The removal of cookies will breathe new life into the IP address. It’s ubiquitous and instant. The IP address is necessary for routing online. Every transaction online has an IP address, whether it be a mobile device or anything else.

However, I think people’s knowledge of what IP targeting can do has not caught up with the innovations we’ve made in the past 10 years. People think it’s a rough targeting technology with only DMA-type reach. That assumption misses all the developments that we’ve made in the interim.

IP targeting has never been more relevant than it is today, and we’ve invested millions of dollars in taking in a whole bunch of data. We’ve turned our data scientists loose: slicing, dicing and tying data to IP addresses to give rich profiles of users at a very granular level, such as the sub-postal code, and in some cases ZIP-plus-4.

We are certainly not down to a household level, as that is nothing that we want to do or can do. Nor, is the internet made for that type of targeting. It’s not something that can be done. But, we can get much deeper profiles of behavior once you know that type of granularity around a user. If a business traveler is at a point of interest, for example at a hotel, he or she will have different interests than a residential online user. We are helping to build context around users. We are doing what we’ve always done; it’s just that now IP targeting has never been more relevant.

In what ways has IP Intelligence evolved during the last 20 years?

We’ve always had the most accurate IP Intelligence technology out there. After years of investing very, very heavily in IP targeting, the gap between data providers has never been bigger. We are light years ahead of the competition.

We have always taken a leadership role, but never has it been more important than it is now―especially considering all of the third-party data that’s available. Remember, just getting third-party data isn’t enough. You have to have the ability to vet that data. Our long-term experience in the industry enables us to validate this data better than anybody. Digital Element has invested in data vetting and onboarding as well as controlled testing that proves that we are exponentially better than competitors.

This isn’t your grandfather’s IP targeting. IP addresses are going to skyrocket in value for ad targeting now. It’s a proven technology. And, considering all of the privacy discussions in the market today, we’re so far ahead of the curve because our data is not invasive.

We’ve never tracked anybody with cookies. This has been in our DNA ever since we started Digital Element. It’s fun to be the cool kids again. Not to mention, we’ve taken the explosion of mobile data and layered that on top of our IP framework.

Did the mobile explosion challenge your adherence to IP targeting?

We always had faith that IP targeting was important. It goes back to our initial mission to not snoop on online users, but help them find content more readily without being creepy. We’re the “non-creepy” technology.

All along the way, we stayed in our lane and invested money there, knowing the importance of what we were doing would eventually lead us to this point. Everyone chased personal information about online users, but we work in a place where you can’t even do that.

It’s not a concept where we track an IP address to a person. IP addresses don’t work that way. They are routed in a network way, not a device way. We’ve been able to take that to the next level.

Therefore, our singular focus on IP targeting helped us become better, and we challenged ourselves to get getter. Now our technology is even more important because companies are using it for mobile targeting.

Businesses want the most granular data around IP addresses so it matches better with mobile. You should have the same level of targeting with respect to all your campaigns―there are not two sides of the house―mobile and everything else. It should be a cohesive strategy regardless of the device.

In most instances, in order for marketers to take advantage of location-based services (LBS) to deliver targeted ads, promotions and content, mobile users must opt-in. But many users refuse, citing reasons such as privacy or battery-life concerns.

And, once they turn LBS services off, it’s often hard to get them to turn them back on. Mobile users will opt in to LBS when they feel they will get something of value in return, but blindly asking someone to opt in does not work. Here we are back to that value exchange.

With IP-based geolocation technology, marketers can fill the mobile gap by allowing companies to target mobile users by location and connection type as they increasingly take advantage of the ever-growing population of rate- and speed-friendly Wi-Fi networks.

By using IP data in a first-layer targeting approach, marketers can give mobile users something of relevance (i.e. a discount at a nearby coffee shop), and thereby incent them to opt in to get even more relevant mobile content as a second layer. Targeting mobile users should be a layered approach. This is how we bridge that gap in the mobile world.

Has having more granular IP data available opened up new markets for Digital Element?

Absolutely! For example, advertising via IP address is great for national or regional companies, but for Mom-and-Pop shops―who need to target by sub-ZIP code or mobile―our hyperlocal data opens up new opportunities for these companies who can advertise on small networks using our data.

They are now more competitive than they ever were. Any local business can fine tune their traffic and get a better return on their ad spend. Our data also helps with attribution and gives advertisers a new layer of information with which to monitor performance and change campaigns on the fly if need be.

Because of the improvements we’ve made, other markets have opened up where local targeting makes sense, especially in today’s new privacy-sensitive and identity-driven landscape.

Want to hear more about the demise of cookies? Readers can connect with Rob on LinkedIn.

Guest Post: How Accessible Data Allows for Deeper Marketing Optimization

Posted on May 1, 2019September 18, 2024 by jsisko

Data has become accessible thanks to advances in technology, including Digital Element, that now empower you as a marketer.

This accessibility opens up opportunities for you as a marketer, letting you go deeper than the base levels of publisher and country. More importantly, you can now make these granular optimizations without spending countless hours trapped by the misery of spreadsheet pivot tables.

The combination of depth plus ease allows you to gain a competitive edge over your peers. Each small optimization you make only produces minor improvements to your performance, but if you can pile them up quickly, they compound into massive returns.

Take your Optimization to the City Level

Go deeper. Rather than treating a country like the United States as a whole, optimize your channels on the city level. Once you’ve done some basic city-level optimization to your channels, start sending traffic to city-specific landing pages, and keep optimizing your conversion rates.

For example, marketers can use Everflow’s analytics report to break down city data:

When you look at the city level, your base conversion-to-event rate for Los Angeles is 14 percent, but only 9 percent for Chicago. This data provides you with an opportunity to test how you can improve your underachieving city’s performance, or whether you should adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.

Creating a Chicago-specific landing page gives you massive levers for conversion rate optimization. You can determine if there is better messaging or offerings for addressing that market, which can lead to significant gains in your conversion rate.

If you’re buying media, then don’t let your evaluation stop at the top-level performance. You can make huge optimization gains by diving deeper and viewing your opportunities on a granular level.

In this example, when looking at the highest revenue cities, everything looks good:

However, if you also examine more pinpointed locations where you’re buying traffic but driving no revenue, then you can quickly boost your margins by deactivating those sources―assuming that you’ve collected enough volume for this data to be statistically relevant:

Data Plus Technology Leads to Performance

When you have a powerful data provider such as Digital Element, and a feature-rich tracking platform like Everflow, you can make smarter decisions about how to run your campaigns and expand your marketing.

You can take it even further and start setting up deterministic automation for these clear decisions, for example, creating notifications when you’ve generated 10,000 clicks from a city without conversions, so you can deactivate those placements inside your media-buying platform.

Being able to easily perform a deeper level of granular optimization opens up substantial opportunities to beat out your competitors. Take advantage of this, and make sure it can be done effectively without burning up your precious hours.

Guest Author: Michael Cole, director of marketing at Everflow

Guest Post: How Smart Targeting Can Help You Achieve High-Performance Marketing

Posted on March 18, 2019November 18, 2024 by jsisko

It goes without saying that location is one of the most important criteria for advertising smart targeting as well as for the optimization of ad campaigns.

Pinpoint data accuracy is a key factor for reaching a designated audience and, ultimately, facilitating better returns from advertising campaigns. From what the comparative statistics show, smart targeting allows advertisers to reach a more relevant audience in comparison to ordinary targeting, that often can leave behind around 30 to 40 percent of potential consumers.

As a solution provider for advertisers, affiliate networks and publishers, Affise offers a performance-marketing platform to run, manage and optimize their ad campaigns. Thus, we need to provide our clients with unmatched geo-accuracy to ad-campaign targeting and tracking.

However, we quickly realized that not all geolocation data providers are created equal and recognized that our current datasets were no longer enough for ensuring accurate targeting for our clients―for whom granular data is a must. The need arose to find a solution with global datasets that would accurately, reliably and non-invasively identify the location of digital consumers to help ensure smart targeting for our clients.

Integrating Industry-Leading IP Intelligence and Geolocation Data

Because the accuracy of geotargeting depends on the quality of the database being used to identify users’ locations, the only solution for us was to partner with Digital Element, the industry leader in global geolocation data and services.

With NetAcuity Edge technology, Affise is able to more accurately geotarget, either as a standalone targeting criterion or by adding accurate IP location data to other datasets to build better targeting profiles. Additional datasets, such as connection speed and mobile carrier, have been added to broaden targeting options and enrich capabilities, helping to improve the relevance and response for online campaigns.

Our team worked diligently to ensure the Affise platform integrated with and deployed the solution for our clients smoothly and effortlessly. Now, Affise clients benefit significantly from this new feature, and we’re changing the way affiliates target their designated audiences by greatly improving the accuracy of our geotargeting.

Multiple Benefits Provide Boosted Performance

The main results of integrating NetAcuity Edge within the Affise platform are highlighted below:

Deeper and More Far-Reaching Analytics
It enables more accurate segmentation of online audiences and gives more detailed portraits of consumers. With this data, advertisers receive much clearer insights into particular customer behaviors and are able to adjust campaigns and target accordingly.
More Accurate Geotargeting and Traffic Tracking
By using more accurate and reliable datasets, our clients reach the right audiences with more relevant ads―ultimately improving click-through rates.
Stronger Fraud Prevention
Using IP intelligence reduces online fraud by more than 90 percent. We’ve seen this benefit through:
1. More balanced risk management where geolocation information is used to identify and allow legitimate accounts access or identify and reject fraud sources;
2. Enhanced identity verification that prevents access from non-targeted or high-fraud areas; and
3. Detection and prevention of non-earmarked traffic from proxies.

With all these advantages, Affise has taken a big step forward to ensure that clients’ advertising campaigns would benefit from smart targeting and have the best possible performance―bringing more conversions and higher ROI.

Guest Author: Dmitrii Zotov, founder and CTO of Affise