How To Use First Party Data In Advertising

Video Transcript: How To Use First Party Data In Advertising

Hello, hello, and welcome to episode number 60 of The Great Reset. My name is Robert Brill, and I'm the CEO of BrillMedia.co. We're an advertising firm that helps companies achieve business results with the best paid media, data, and targeting available in the marketplace.

And on this series, particularly the focus here on AdTech, we're looking at the behind-the-scenes technologies that make up this paid media, data, and targeting. We are here five days a week talking about marketing and advertising for senior marketing executives, entrepreneurs, and anyone who is looking to grow their company. In the last video, we went into the mechanics of how data is cultivated.

Most of our actions online and offline are tracked, the raw data sets are captured, refined into segments, and those segments are sold across data marketplace, notably across demand-side platforms. And since data is a key element of how advertising and marketing is deployed in 2020, the way data is used is very important. In this episode, we're going to talk about the first-party data, also known as retargeting or remarketing data.

There are five types of first-party data that we should be thinking about, but first, let's dive into what it is, and then we'll talk about the types of first-party data, and then finally, we'll talk about how this data is used. First-party data is the data that's owned by you, the business owner, and the data that is proprietary to you. Whoever you are, the data that you have that is unique to your business is that first-party data.

Facebook's data is first-party to Facebook. Same with Amazon, Brill Media, and every other company that exists. Some companies will have more first-party and proprietary data than others.

This data is important because it's so unique to your business. No one has the customer relationships that you have. Whether you have 10 customers or 10 million, those are your relationships and your data sets.

And with those data sets, the connections that you have to those customers are incredibly valuable. In fact, this data is a moat around your business that protects it from competitive incursions. Here are the five types of first-party data.

Site or app, page, purchase, behavior, social, and then email or contact info. All of these data sets are available for targeting to consumers through paid media. So let's dive right in.

Site or app data. When we talk about remarketing, this is the most common form of remarketing. Ads are delivered to users who have recently been to the website.

Let's talk about page data. This is invaluable for direct-to-consumer or e-commerce brands. Ads are delivered to people who have gone through the shopping process but have not completed the purchase.

For other advertisers, page-level retargeting is all about targeting people with different interactions to your business. So for example, Brill Media has an Instagram guide for location-dependent businesses. And we have a 2020 advertising trading desk success guide.

The person interested in the Instagram marketing guide will be a different type of person, probably, than the person who wants to learn about the advertising trading desk. So by hyper-targeting users based on the individual pages that they've been on within our site, we get to segment the creative messages to these consumers. So page-level targeting is really about identifying a specific page on your site and serving ads to people who visited a specific page.

Or, likewise, segmenting every page of your site and creating unique messages to everyone based on the last pages they saw, for example. Behavioral remarketing. I like this because it really comprises a fuller view of our audience behaviors.

Behavioral retargeting is about targeting people who took a series of actions on our site. So not just people who visited an individual page. We want to look at their holistic visitation behavior.

Maybe I want to target people who visited the advertising success guide three times in the last week with a different message than people who visited the page one time, for example. So the targeting there is based on the behavior of frequency. Or if a user visited any five pages on the BrillMedia.co site, they might get a different message than a person who has visited any one page on the site over the last week.

Or the person who visited more pages on the site is indicative of their overall higher interest, so they should get a different message. Maybe the message for a person who visited our site more than five times is, hey, we should really talk because we can help you with marketing. But the message to the person who visited our site once in the last week should be, hey, maybe you should download one of our guides because that's particularly, that might get you more interested in learning more about our organization.

So really segmenting behaviors across the site and serving up ads based on those behaviors. Now let's move to social retargeting. This is powerful across platforms, but I'll focus in on Facebook.

The idea with Facebook is that anyone who engaged with our page, for example, in the last 14 days should see an ad because their interest is fresh. And when I say engaged, they liked, commented, or shared, or clicked on one of our page posts. Or I can target ads to people who interacted with our lead form, but who didn't actually submit their information.

We can do this with Instagram, events on Facebook, button clicks on the Facebook page, and anyone who sent a message to our page or anyone who simply visited our page. So the idea is if I have an event, let's say I want, I promote an event, a webinar on Facebook, and I use the events feature on Facebook, I can remarket to people who interacted with the event. Or I can remarket ads to people who have recently clicked on a button on our Facebook page.

Or people who have engaged with our Instagram. Or anyone who just, just isolating people who have sent messages to our page recently. So there are ways, really, what we're thinking about is ways to cut and dice or filter audiences based on this remarketing function.

Next, let's move to purchase. Purchase remarketing is great for ongoing storytelling. After a person completes the purchase on your page or on your site, you have an opportunity to run ads that give them follow-up offers.

So for example, if a person buys a t-shirt, you may offer them pants. Or a different t-shirt with the same style, maybe with a 10% off coupon for being a good customer. And then finally, email or contact info.

If you have people who subscribe to your email list, this is valuable. These people may have opted in to download a white paper, bought something on your website, or attended an online webinar. Either way that you've acquired these email addresses, as long as people have opted in, so it's email addresses or phone number or address data can be used to target people with ads.

The ads appear across platforms including banners, native ads, video, connected televisions, digital audio, Facebook, and across social platforms. This is particularly powerful because you get the opportunity to remarket to people with new offers or opportunities after they've already connected with you. First-party data, as you can see in these examples, is used to connect to people who have existing relationships with your business, so these business relationships continue to grow.

Typically, we see three things happen with first-party data or remarketing. The first is dynamic creative. Dynamic creative is an opportunity to give users a one-to-one experience between the user and the brand.

Ads are delivered based on a logic that understands the images and copy versions that should be used in the ad. The use of dynamic creative is one way that creative is an amplifier to the media investment. We see higher return on ad spend when our remarketing ads are delivered to users who abandon cart and then see an ad with the exact purchase or product or service that they recently viewed on the site.

Dynamic creative requires initial setup, determination on the type of decisioning logic, standardized creative formatting, and the build-out of creative templates that are used to house the creative iterations. But the setup and the upfront work is well worth it in terms of dramatically higher return on ad spend. The second is customized messaging.

With customized messaging, there is less effort that goes into the initial setup, so all the stuff that I broke out about dynamic creative really isn't happening, but the creative is still customized based on, for example, where the user is in the purchase funnel. This means that a user is in the consideration phase. If they're in the consideration phase, they get one set of creative execution, and the user is in the purchase phase, they get another set of creative executions.

The ads are not dynamic because they don't change based on direct one-to-one relationship to the consumer, but the ads are easier to build and still preserve the traditional creative framework, which is the creative team develops the ad, they see the creation of the ad fully formed, and those ads are delivered as fully contained marketing messages. Whereas dynamic creative, you have different images and different copy points, and they all get assembled dynamically. And finally, without dynamic or custom creative, we use remarketing to ensure that people who are about to purchase see your message as they make their purchase decisions, because we want to ensure that if they're going to make the buy, they're going to buy our clients' brands.

If you're not sure if you should be remarketing, chances are the answer is yes, you should be remarketing. Even if you only have a thousand people coming to your site a month or on your Facebook page, if they are interested and they are valuable, they should see a continuous story told through your remarketing ads. Remarketing keeps your brand in front of the key consumers and ensures that they remain interested and increases your media investment.

So that's it for this episode of The Great Reset. We'll see you tomorrow for another episode. Talk to you soon.