Reforming Digital Audiences

Deterministic Online Targeting: Direct Mail Online

Every marketer would prefer transparent, deterministic data in the audience building process.

CRM files, direct mail lists, and website visits clearly represent the kind of tangible targeting that brings better returns. But as digital marketing evolved into a marketing mix staple, the option to leverage deterministic offline data was, more often than not, sacrificed for alternatives such as “intender segments” in order to achieve unique user reach.

The problem: Matching a CRM record or a site visit to an active cookie is a challenge for both scale and campaign veracity – especially when an audience is centered in a local area or on a specific product or service.

Take, for example, a home appliance brand. A marketer may purchase a cookie segment identified as users who have an ‘inferred’ interest in kitchen remodeling. Online banners are served and a consumer engages with the brand by clicking. The few users who click (typically less than 1%) are transferred into a retargeting pool. These consumers will receive ads to reflect their interest in home appliances and are also used to validate the original cookie segment. They are likely retargeted relentlessly, regardless of where they are in the buying cycle.

With less than half of users and devices allowing third-party cookies, existing intender matches from one ad click or online purchase have to be enhanced with other cookies that represent people who are essentially unknowns:

• • People who are earlier in the buying cycle
• • People who are looking, but have no financial ability to transact
• • People who were already in the audience segment and represent duplicate leads

The key here is the blind nature of the outreach and the lack of unique users. Onboarding to audience IDs based on emails or social logins is growing in popularity and attempts to address the duplication issue, but scale remains a problem. Marketers have had to resign themselves to testing multiple options and pumping enough untargeted money to fill the top of the funnel to optimize impressions around retargeting.

However, mapping audiences to IP data can provide better scale and transparency to who is in your audience, who is engaging, and what marketing initiatives precipitated engagement.

A data activation platform utilizing IP addresses can map static network and mobile device ISP delivery points to households. With this, the household match can come from a CRM list or an offline mailing list that indexes highly for a home remodeling. With IP targeting, the audience can be further qualified by layering in more offline deterministic data such as the age of a home, home equity, family discretionary income, or all prior visits to the advertiser’s site.

IP-based audience targeting starts with the modem of a household or business to reach every Internet-connected device. Additional devices such as Mobile smartphones and tablets on carrier networks are mapped to locations down to the lot size of homes and businesses. For over 250 million consumers, 140 million homes, and 23 million businesses, Semcasting’s IP-based Smart Zones targeting precisely locates over 170 million network connections and over 140 million mobile carrier IPs by location and address.

The IP Address of impressions served can be deterministically matched back to CRM Customer files, audience impressions, online or offline sales transactions, as well as to any visit by any interested party to the advertiser’s website.

Learn more about Smart Zones and how Semcasting can turn your digital campaign into Direct Mail Online.