When online advertising was just an audience extension tool, the details of the data onboarding process for the digital audiences didn’t really matter. A postal or email list from the CRM platform was submitted into the on-boarding black-box, and out came digital IDs. Not only did digital IDs come back – they often came back with a ten times multiple to the count of the original submitted list.
On one level, this made sense since a browser associated with a person typically has a dozen cookies or more associated with each person. That said, inside the black box, the actual number of unique matches was only somewhere around 40% for a broadly defined retail audience, and often less than 15% for a business-to-business list. With half of the desktops blocking third party cookies and most business networks blocking cookies at the modem – this default coverage is certainly sub-optimal.
For some real numbers:
Lacking scale of unique users, campaigns have had to back fill. This is done by ad-operations specialists filling the audience with ‘intent’ pools, where everything from any digital IDs in the same geography to “clone models” are thrown into the mix. These added-value options (some of which you pay for) increase the count of uniques but effectively dilute from existence the integrity of any onboarding process. In the black-box world of onboarding— who you onboarded and the online audience you reached in the campaign— may have little to do with each other than being in the same zip-code. You don’t actually know, because there is no way to prove it one way or the other.
Onboarding needs to step out from the shadows – CRM match rates need to become universally actionable, transparent, and high.
Whether it’s called people-based targeting or the universal ID, the digital environment needs to become the equivalent of Direct Mail Online. The new model needs to allow us to transparently connect offline people to proven online engagements, and then convert them back again…
Measurement can no longer be a forecast or a model extrapolated from a half dozen buyers. It requires transparency across devices, channels, and locations from each CRM entry to its digital ID and to the point of sale.
It’s a deterministic measurement system that would be equally as effective in measuring the impact of digital marketing spend for online transactions as it is for an in-store counter purchase. It is also the missing piece when it comes to an even greater breakthrough in digital marketing spend.
Transparency to the digital footprint is the key. Whether you need to know about who is visiting your site, who hit your landing page, or measure whether the impressions served in the last campaign were part of the audience you paid for, UDX-Leads is designed to bring online to offline transparency to the marketing dollar.
For more information go to: UDX-Leads or contact us directly.
