Finding Your Audience Starts with Smart Analytics

This is the second post in our Analytic Framework blog series. For more, see the first post on balancing targeting precision with broad reach. 

As we’ve been discussing in our Analytic Frameworks blog series, there are many opportunities available in the programmatic ecosystem, and an analytical framework based on core business questions can be the opening move in extracting more value from your data. One of the most important of those questions might simply be: “Where is my audience?”

It’s easy to launch a campaign cold and then sit back and let the algorithms answer that question for you, but even the best algorithm will take time. If you want to generate an inclusion list, for example, you’ve got to let the campaign run for a period of time, closely examine performance, identify sites on which performance is strong, and then proactively target those sites. It’s an efficient process but a relatively long one.

It’s possible, however, to get a “head start.”

Turn’s media-planning pack draws upon impression data across our entire footprint–even before we run any media at all–and it lets us find sites where our target users are more present in a natural, more organic way. When there’s a higher overlap between a given site’s audience and the audience that we’ve identified as possible converters, that’s a site that we need to pay attention to.

The benefits of a media-planning pack go beyond site specifics though. While we can measure the presence of a given audience on individual sites, we can help marketers understand the regions in which their audiences are present in greater numbers. Going a step further, a good media-planning pack can be used not only to find out where users are, but also to create profiles of them based on their media consumption; in other words, looking at the types of sites they visit can help us identify and categorize them more efficiently.

Some of this might seem unexciting or overly basic. Often people want to put something flashy or interactive in front of clients. We’re regularly asked to come up with a set of “cool” insights. But it’s counterproductive to focus on dazzling someone or having something wow-inducing to include in a quarterly business report. It’s much more effective to start with formulating the business questions you want answered—including, of course, “Where is my audience”—and let the media-planning pack guide you in those inquiries.

That is not to say that the insights generated this way totally lack a “wow” factor. There are times when real surprises present themselves. A marketer seeking to validate an idea or have a preconceived notion about consumers affirmed can actually find out they’ve been sorely mistaken. Although marketers like to believe that they know their own customers best, that happens much more often than you might think.

If the media planning pack shows unexpected results, a planned campaign should quickly be adjusted. For example, if you discover unanticipated sites where your customers are present in higher numbers, the easiest and most natural first step is to build an inclusion list to target that group of sites. You might want to next approach the publisher directly to negotiate. The important thing is to make good use of the insights provided by your media-planning pack. Remember that they can be useful during the RFP process and well beyond, informing decisions about broader marketing initiatives, creative, and more.

For more on analytic frameworks, see the intro to this series and the first post, “How a CPG Brand Used Analytics to Discover New Customers.”

About Amobee

Founded in 2005, Amobee is an advertising platform that understands how people consume content. Our goal is to optimize outcomes for advertisers and media companies, while providing a better consumer experience. Through our platform, we help customers further their audience development, optimize their cross channel performance across all TV, connected TV, and digital media, and drive new customer growth through detailed analytics and reporting. Amobee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tremor International, a collection of brands built to unite creativity, data and technology across the open internet.

If you’re curious to learn more, watch the on-demand demo or take a deep dive into our Research & Insights section where you can find recent webinars on-demand, media plan insights & activation templates, and more data-driven content. If you’re ready to take the next step into a sustainable, consumer-first advertising future, contact us today.