As consumer data collection increases, marketing becomes more specialized and accurate. The process of segmenting new channels, however, requires that marketers work to perfect data normalization standards that didn’t exist a few years ago.
A consumer’s digital activity loop is difficult to close. Search, display, social, mobile, email – every device, platform, and channel speaks in its own data language. The cookie, invented by Netscape in 1994, is the closest we’ve come to a common data normalization solution. Unfortunately, the cookie is functionally useless in over half the digital channels marketers work with today, and for the other half there’s only a one-way data translation capability.
A store customer can be converted into a vaguely-trackable cookie (at about a 30% match rate) if they buy online from their desktop, but marketers are completely blind if a cookie walks into a store or if that transaction takes place on a mobile device.
In order to work in a “common data currency” across digital and physical channels, marketers need to consider alternative means for deterministically mapping out consumer marketing outreach and attribution.
By mapping physical locations to Internet delivery points and device IP addresses, our patented Smart Zones technology has taken important steps towards this new data normalization process.
If you know a postal address, you can target a consumer or business online with complete transparency. With Smart Zones, the IP address from a website visitor can now be successfully identified to a location and profiled and targeted. In the same way, a mobile device location can now be deterministically tied to a delivery point and back to the home. You can now even expand your marketing tactics to include event targeting, bill-board, store-display, IP radio and programmatic TV, and alternative internet of things device targeting as part of your marketing mix.
For over 240 million consumers, 140 million homes, and 18 million businesses, we can locate advertising delivery points and transactions through our Smart Zones platform. We can map web traffic back to its source, and we can overlay over 750 advanced attributes about homes, businesses, demographics, and socio-economic profiles. Once you understand who your consumers are and how they’re engaging with your marketing, with Smart Zones you can better define audiences to target, report performance, and develop new follow up campaigns with insight and confidence.
To learn more, download our Smart Zones Product Overview.