One of the fun things about digital advertising is the way it makes yesterday’s campaigns look like primitive cave art. Think about how a franchised company would have run ads back when the Internet was new. Most likely it would have picked its top-selling product and plastered those ads across every possible screen.
Since then we’ve gotten more refined, of course – and nothing’s as refined as raw data. No, that’s not a contradiction. Here’s why: only unstructured data puts the right viewer in front of the right ad.
The more sharply targeted your ad, the better response you’re going to get. Take those ads of yesterday. Because they couldn’t hone in on niche audiences, they had to gamble on their safest guess, rather than their most accurate data. Today we do have that data, and it’s been a real game changer for national brands and franchised businesses.
To use our favorite auto analogy, imagine you run a national chain of Toyota dealerships. Overall, your best-selling model is the Camry. So do you invest all your budget in ads for Camrys?
No. Camrys don’t sell the same everywhere. Your dealership in Palo Alto, for instance, has a lot full of Priuses because they sell like hotcakes in California. They’re going after a different customer than your dealership in Fort Worth, Texas; Tundra pickup trucks are what sell big there. And because anyone shopping for a new car probably has a checklist a mile long, you can keep getting more specific from there. Someone wants a new Tundra and someone else is looking for a used truck. Those California Prius buyers may want the smallest model or the bigger Prius V.
From Generalizations to Granularity
This represents a quantum leap in targeting ability, especially when you’re familiar with the limits of pre-packaged data segments. Because you can’t look inside that segment, your sum total of information about that the group is “auto intender.” Not exactly a deep insight, there. The same applies to buying a data segment for a “new clothes” intender and getting a Miami viewer looking for swim trunks and a Vermont user shopping for snow boots. That’s going to lead to a lot of wasted impressions and misused budget. Only unstructured data lets you see all the detail and nuances that helps you connect the right ad with the right person.
This isn’t just for national businesses, by the way. Even a local business can get in on the act. Let’s say you run a small business offering plumbing, electrical and air conditioning services for a large city. Your data tells you that residents in the center of the city have greater demand for A/C services, while suburban residents tend to have more plumbing problems. So you serve up different ads accordingly.
And it’s not just location that matters. Simpli.fi can target and optimize thousands of elements on each campaign. That can mean an increase in granularity hundreds of times over compared to the typical handful of targeting segments other platforms offer. What this means for your budget: instead of running 10 campaigns for $1,000 daily, you could run 1000 campaigns for $10 per day. You’re spending the same budget, but getting much more powerful results.
We’re all trying to target and optimize audiences more effectively. No one wants to waste marketing dollars on the wrong impressions. Luckily every business can now hone in on the specific markets in their vertical and make every impression a good one.