4 Ways Audience Owners Can Improve ROI Using Real-World Data

The digital age has drastically changed the publishing industry, leaving many audience owners reliant on ad revenue to achieve success. While contextual targeting was once the norm, audience-based targeting has taken over in recent years. 

However, audience owners are faced with a challenge: how can they gain a comprehensive understanding of their audience’s behaviour outside of their own website? The answer lies in leveraging real-world data. 

Real-world data entails mobility, lifestyle, brand affinity, demographics, income size, visit patterns, and home location. It helps audience owners connect the digital footprints of their audience with real-world behaviour.

By leveraging this valuable resource, audience owners can gain insights that allow them to better understand their audience’s behaviours, preferences, and habits. This solution results in increased revenues that span beyond just ad targeting. 

In this blog post, we’ll explore four powerful ways that audience owners can utilise real-world data to improve their ROI, including:

• Sales Planning
• Better Targeting
• Better Personalisation and Offers
• Offline Attribution

Sales Planning

Audience owners stand a far better chance of attracting advertisers and commanding higher rates if they have a deeper understanding of their audience. Real-world data gives audience owners the opportunity for direct sales of display advertising across their inventory. With more data in hand, audience owners can prove to advertisers that their target customers are among their visitors. Comprehensive information about website traffic that also matches footfall traffic at a certain store or chain, can be a  powerful tool for audience owners to better align with the advertiser’s interests.

For instance, suppose a website is often visited by high-end jewellery buyers. Audience owners can use this insight to attract more ad dollars to their website. Audience data is also essential in identifying opportunities for branded content that can open up new revenue sources without sacrificing experience. When audience owners truly understand their audience, positioning audience interests with that of the brand becomes much more accessible.

You can see this in action, where Azira worked with one of the leading global publishers to help them understand real-world behaviour of their audiences. The publisher used insights such as brand affinity, dwell time, propensities-to-visit brands and identify patterns to enable their sales teams to have productive conversations with brands and advertisers.

Better Targeting

When it comes to targeting the right audience, audience owners  can strike gold with real-world data. Combining digital footprint with real world data is a whole new ballgame that raises the ante for audience owners. 

For example, knowing a user visits a lot of web pages about high-end audio systems brings insight, but it may just be “aspirational” browsing. Knowing that the same user has visited relevant stores in person is a bigger clue that can increase their potential purchase by tenfold with a strategic placement of an online ad.

Audience owners can create purposeful and goal-oriented ads that target an audience that is truly interested in the brand. They can use real-world data to identify which sites their audience visits, what their interests are, and what they purchase offline. This data can then be used to create personalised ad campaigns that are relevant to the audience’s interests and increase the chances of conversion.

By using real-world data, audience owners can better target their audience and increase their revenues with more actionable outputs.

Better Personalization and Offers

Adding real-world data to online stats generates spot patterns that might otherwise remain a mystery. Audience owners can leverage this data to generate helpful insights that allow them to stay ahead of the game, and better personalise their offers to their audience. By understanding audience behaviour patterns, audience owners can predict user behaviour and know where to place a targeted offer and at what time. This approach is far more effective than simply looking for an audience based on the demographics of the assumed ‘average buyer’.

For example, audiences who visit a golf site are far more likely to buy premium whiskeys than the average consumer. Similarly, it could be that paid subscribers to a stock tips newsletter are much more likely to travel to the Far East than the people who only read the free articles. These insights can then be used to create personalised offers that are tailored to the audience’s interests, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Offline Attribution

For brick and mortar stores, offline attribution brings in a wealth of information and gives an effective measurement of advertiser’s online campaigns. By bringing together offline and online data, Offline attribution is another powerful tool that provides  marketers with an all-inclusive view of their campaign’s accomplishment across all marketing channels. This is achieved with supplementing data onboarding, which is then integrated with attribution platforms to provide marketers with a solution in a familiar interface.

Using real-world data drastically increases the number of data points to work with and efficiently tracks how successfully advertising has worked. By leveraging real-world data, advertisers can even reframe the importance of a website. For example, let’s say a website carried a display ad linking to that advertiser’s online store. At first glance, it might appear the number of orders or click-through was disappointing. However, with the right data the publisher might discover that people who saw the ads were more likely to buy a product when they next visited the advertiser’s retail store. This insight can be used to create more targeted and effective ad campaigns that drive conversions and increase revenues.

Conclusion

Real-world data is changing the way audience owners and brands approach advertising. By combining digital footprints with real-world data, audience owners can better target their audience, provide greater personalisation, and accurately measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. 

The use of real-world data allows for a more complete understanding of consumer behaviour, enabling advertisers to create purposeful and goal-oriented ads that are relevant to the audience’s interests, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Having access to offline attribution provides advertisers with a comprehensive view of their campaign’s effectiveness across all channels, helping them understand how successful their advertising has been. The use of real-world data drastically increases the number of data points to work with, enabling marketers to more efficiently track their campaigns’ success and adjust their strategies accordingly.

Learn more about what Azira can do for audience owners and publishers here.