Data Mountains & How To Deal With Them?

“In God we trust, all others must bring data” – William Edwards Deming (statistician)

The numerous marketing systems today with distinct functions, make marketers switch between multiple tabs/windows to effectively market and understand its impact. Additionally, the digital advertising spectrum keeps widening with the growing numbers of mar-tech providers, technologists and data solution providers. What solution really maps individual customer journeys or which one allows you to market effectively? Do you spend time in sourcing reports and preparing a single Excel doc to have a holistic customer profile?

Because according to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report 2017, on an average an enterprise uses 91 marketing automated platforms. Dive a little deeper and you’ll find that based on “functions”, there are close to 180 display and programmatic advertising solutions and around 161 marketing automation and campaign management platforms. This clearly depicts how complicated the life of a marketer really is. Multiple platforms that result in data silos also bring about work duplication, which means, more man-hours are spent on collation of reports than actually driving business with insights. Disconnected platforms that house customer data make data management challenging.

Busy But Not Bright?

Marketers spend hours collating data from point-of-sale (POS) systems, client relationship management (CRM) software, loyalty program databases and more. Once this tedious task is through, they resort to marketing platforms and automation tools. Do you see how many platforms and interfaces they deal with? Imagine the amount of offline data (POS, CRM etc.) a marketer really has in reserve? This is where a platforms like customer data platforms (CDP) and data management platforms (DMP) becomes handy. CDPs allow marketers to exercise control over their customer data but does not that erase the need for a marketing automation platform. CDP vendors are specialized in automation, tag management and/or deriving personalized insights, but still does not cover marketing attribution. Similarly, DMPs power data-driven marketing powered but cannot double as a marketing platform.

Marketers have their hands on multiple software platforms but they’re still short of time and a single view of customers.

A Bright Ray Of Hope

The need of the hour is a solution with the ability to ingest data from multiple sources, make customer buckets, shoot relevant ads and attribute success to the right advertising mediums. One platform to do all that!

A unified data management solution that provides predictive insights, automates marketing and subsequently feeds on campaign data for further intelligence is your fix! Marketers’ work would be more effective when insights, analytics and ad-dollar spend views appear in on a single window. This digital activation helps marketers innovate based on the intent and interest of target customers resulting in effective ad-dollar spends.

 

 

What Is Big Data Analytics & What’s The Obsession With It?

Big Data Big Hype?

Well no, because we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. And the last 3 years have potentially witnessed the maximum surge in data. New devices, sensors, new technologies stand responsible for this data explosion.

There are over 300 million smartphone users in India alone. Now imagine the data spurted out from all the smart devices, the cloud and other databases? Such variety of data arrive in increasing volumes and with a high velocity given our consumption of digital services. This gives rise to big data. And since it takes data to make confident and productive decisions, it goes without saying that marketers feel slightly overwhelmed. What’s more is that traditional data processing applications fail to process and justly assess such mounting data sets. This makes data-driven marketing go awry.

Bring In The Facts: Analytics

Plus points of data-driven advertising include the ability to reach the most convertible customers right when they’re in need of goods/services. It’s easy said, than done that to achieve this all marketers need to do is gather the data points from across channels that customers frequent and convert it into actionable information. 

Let’s say you’re a business in a B2C situation and you’re looking at driving sales with audience insights. And let’s assume you’re aware of the multiple channels (screens, devices, website and more) that your target audience frequent. So how do you gather the data? Where do you store it? What do you make of it?

Analytics answers the above questions and more that directly power your marketing instincts. For example, in our previous blog we talk about controlling and optimizing data under one roof while still directing you to the coordinates of your future buyers.

Of course, with the reach of technology today, it’s possible to analyze your data and get answers from it almost right away. You can train an in-house resource to do the job or partner with specialist companies to educate you about individual customer needs. With big data analytics, you’ll realize that it is possible to look past the horizons of insight.

UDM: How Data Under One Roof Can Help Marketers See The Future

User data is constantly sprouting in every corner of the web and mobile universe, with every passing second. We see ad tech companies, brands, ad networks and exchanges and every middleman scampering about in an attempt to collect that knowledge from each of its sources. But in this hunt for extracting valuable information from oceans of data every day, there lies a big gap between connecting nameless/faceless digits provided by Data Management Platforms (DMPs) to the more tangible, yet minuscule number of known IDs that come in through Customer Data Platforms (CDPs).

That’s the challenge that we at BPRISE have worked to solve.

Not Just DMP, But Holistic Data Management

When advertisers buy media across a vast range of different sites and through various middlemen, including DSPs, ad networks and exchanges, DMPs typically tie all that activity and subsequent audience data together in one, centralized location. This is used to help optimize future media buys and improve target practice when a client wants to reach a certain filtered demographic. But what the DMPs provide is only 3rd party information that’s ripe for the taking for you and your competitors going after the same customer(s). They don’t provide you with unique identifiers and definite readings of your prospective buyers. You need to knock on a CDP’s door for that.

Or you could just ring our doorbell instead, to cover both sides of the spectrum. We at BPRISE have devised our own system that marries the expansive reach and global access of DMPs with the precision and pointed knowledge of CDPs. We call it UDMP-Unified Data Management Platform. Since we trace your customers even when they travel outside of your website/app framework onto other 3rd party territories, with our UDMP, we are able to connect this first-hand CDP data with information from 3rd party apps and websites (information that has already been analysed by DMPs). This is a more durable and privacy-led connector between known and unknown ID types. So, everything from transaction data, demographic data, and virtually infinite amounts of behavioural data all churn away under our UDMP warehouse.

Thanks to UDMP behaving as a superset of data from DMPs and CDPs, we are able to provide a consolidated view of your customers’ interests and better predict future behaviours, consumer paths and motivations. Since we bridge the gap between DMPs and CDPs and manage the relationship between the ‘general’ mass of data points and known facts about uniquely identified consumer profiles, we have the power to enrich email lists and retargeting campaigns with anonymous DMP attributes to drive performance in known channels.

UDMP. More Juice, Less Faff.

By building this UDMP we can help our clients to better understand customer information and do it with major operational efficiency. Every data point is enriched and made sense of in a way that ensures minimal waste of key information and full use of the cost that went into acquiring that data.

UDM provides you with a data-set of your actual audience which can be activated across an entire life cycle: acquisition, engagement, conversion, and retention. There aren’t restrictions on the types of data you can collect, the segmentation is real-time, and it is channel agnostic to ensure the seamless flow of data. This flexibility arms brands and advertisers with an ability to really explore more possibilities and methods to engage with their user bases.

Controlling such vast amounts and types of data all under one roof also allows us to come to more accurate conclusions, at a faster rate. This in turn feeds into optimisation campaigns and switching strategies to capitalise on emerging trends. By unifying the DMP and CDP universes, at BPRISE we constantly refine lookalike models and present our clients with not just the 411 about their existing customers, but also point them to the coordinates of their future buyers and patrons as well.

So, we’re saying, instead of employing the services of multiple middlemen entities to gather information about the same target audience, give us a call. With our Unified Data Management Platform, we warehouse all the data pouring in from numerous locations and hand it to you in a way that makes sense. If you believe that Data is the new currency, then know that UDMP functions as a big bank. Start your account with us today!

Data To Solve The “Customer Profile” Jigsaw

Delusions Courtesy Multiple Data Platforms

Before we talk about data, let’s talk about all the technology vendors who promise to provide a “360-degree view of customers”. Players in this segment include CDP, DMP and CRM software providers. Which one’s really fit for you?

Would you deploy an array of such software platforms to identify a channel you’d rather invest in to drive sales, promote your brand or generate leads? Even if you do, it does not clearly pick and show you all of your customer’s interactions with your brand’s campaign across sites and ad platforms.

Driving Sales But Not Customer Engagement?

Although there isn’t a direct link between a sale and a campaign, having your point-of-sale and digital identifiers synced can get you answers with some level of certainty. Digital identifiers include cookies and mobile advertising IDs. If you have a sale done at your store, wouldn’t you want to match it with the digital campaign that influenced the customer to make the purchase?

Some tech partners can help you achieve this by studying the change in foot traffic at your stores. Oftentimes, GPS lat/long data points, WiFi connections, and the data from Bluetooth beacons are measured to attribute sales.

So you have enterprise software vendors and a good number of tech partners but would you claim that you put all this data and the customer’s proximity to your stores to good use?

Disparate Systems Equal Data Silos

Companies resort to matching customer details with hashed email IDs to attribute sales but no one’s sure of its accuracy. Why? Because, conditions apply. You must identify the user across sites and apps. The user must opt in to share his/her location. Your store’s information about still being in business must be mapped across cities. That’s a lot of data and there’s still plenty of sources that house customer information, like:

  • Customer Relationship Management Software
  • Data Management Platforms
  • Customer Data Platforms
  • Transaction Data
  • Customer Forms or other databases

How do you finish the customer jigsaw with pieces of information from all the above sources? Or can you already tell that these sources have a superset that can potentially cure all your data hiccups? Here’s an article if you’re interested in reading a little more about how to use your data efficiently.

Watch this space for the next blog wherein our founder introduces a new concept to have all your data requirements catered to from one place.

 

Marketing: Data The Stepping Stone

In today’s day and age, there is so much content available – written content, video content, marketing content and so forth for the end user. Drawing parallels with marketers, it becomes clear that they have a mounting pile of “data”. Where does all the data come from? CRMs, transaction data, customer data and other databases to name a few.

Does your data provide you with adequate insight to answer all your questions related to marketing? Well, one easy way to identify an issue is when you know there’s an element in your equation that just doesn’t add up. Too much data, too many graphs with complicated text is often hard to comprehend. As advertisers you need to be able to understand the data you have at hand in a quick and effortless manner! You’d then be able to predict the consumer needs of your target audiences.

Data analyses equip marketing and sales to construct their respective plans that are in line with the organization’s goal. If you are an advertiser, here are a few pointers to help you mediate and use your data more efficiently:

  1. Profile data: The practice of data profiling helps you comprehend the first-party, second-party, and third-party data; wherein, you identify the missing links and incorrect entries listed within the data set. This promises quality data collection while assuring its relevance to your target audience.
  2. Standardize: Standardizing data across channels enables you to establish an intelligent customer database. For marketers in an organization to know what to measure and how to measure it, it is important to set standards. Start with the external sources or with the internal data your currently own.
  3. Maintain consistency – Data can be interpreted differently by people and even computer systems, for example, if an individual were to list his employer as Tata, when filling out a form to download a white paper, the system might not recognize it since it is only familiar with TCS. Therefore, it is important to have standards set and to record the data in a manner, that is recognized universally. One such example is how dates need to be recorded, whether in the format of dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy.
  4. Treat data silos: The information from the various regional offices, departments and different communication channels of an organization contribute to growing amounts of data. Irrelevance or inconsistency in data, can lead to miscommunication or confusion even within the organization. It is therefore vital that you have processes, guidelines and technologies in place to make sure that the branches, and teams sharing data work effectively together.

What if one software could collect, organize, administer, analyze, conduct data quality checks and recognize the trends within the acquired consumer database? It is about time that marketers’ jobs are made a little bit easier by breaking information silos and giving them a leg up with clarity and easy access to the right resource. The result will mean more time for you to get the creativity flowing to boost your brand’s presence.

 

 

Purchase Digital Ads Using Software

Fundamentally what programmatic advertising means is, using software to purchase digital ad spots. Programmatic can be defined as the use of software-driven technology to automate the whole ad buying process or even automate parts of it. It is also sometimes called advertising done programmatically or programmatic buying or just programmatic.

#1 Promise Of Programmatic Advertising

Efficiency & simplicity: Because “programmatic” automates the ad buying and selling process with the help of software and technology they achieve better scale and speed than humans possibly can.

#2 Promise Of Programmatic Advertising

Precision & relevancy: Because “programmatic” makes it possible for advertisers to incorporate large amounts of data, they’re able to serve users with ads that are more likely relevant based on users’ behavioral, demographic, psychographic data and purchase intents.

Traditionally online ads, like print and TV, were directly bought by sales persons, who negotiated on terms such as target audience, placements, the number of impressions and price after which both parties signed an insertion order. Direct sales or deals like these are still prevalent but now technology can be used to simplify or automate the process.

Wait, Where Does The Data Come From?

Programmatic comes with the ability to couple data with automation and this makes it possible to target audiences based on their behaviours, demographics, interests and other individual characteristics. Not only do you get to focus on where to place your ad with programmatic, but also on who sees your ad.

Programmatic technology equips advertisers to target segments of audience who are most likely to be interested in what they’re selling. When your system spots a cookie or mobile identifier that matches the targeting criteria you’ve set as an advertiser, you can bid for ad impressions automatically in real time.

The Role Of Data In Digital Advertising

You already know that publishers and social networks learn about keywords searched, types of content consumed and profile information of users with the help of cookies and identifiers. It is commonly practiced across the digital (ad) spectrum.

Wonder where advertisers get data from? If you’re an advertiser, you probably have your own first-party data that may include sales transaction data, CRM data, customer names, emails, types of products purchased, recent purchasers, and average order value.

Data aggregators are companies that become a third-party data source. Such companies often have demographic data points of users that are of value to advertisers. They have information like credit score, household income and purchase behaviour of users.

Plug in a programmatic platform and advertisers can target audiences using a number of data sources at the time an impression becomes available. Let’s say the cookie or other identifier matches your targeting criteria, then the ad buying system (a trading desk or demand side platform) will automatically bid on the impression.

Breaking down Programmatic Buying

Real-Time Bidding (RTB)

RTB is the use of technology in bidding for ad impressions in real time. Such auction-based buying happens on open ad exchanges or in private marketplaces. Any buying platform can bid in open ad exchanges for inventory that have been put up for auction, by numerous sites (publishers). 

Private marketplaces (PMP) are invitation-only RTB arenas in which one or a handful of publishers (“premium publishers”) make their inventory or audiences available to a certain number of buyers.

Programmatic Direct

When ad inventory is sold to buyers directly by the publisher’s sales-force without an auction it is called programmatic direct. Although human intervention may not be required in programmatic direct deals, it is more manual than RTB. Programmatic guaranteed deals can be made for reserved inventory at a set price. Unreserved inventory are sold at fixed rates i.e. buyers are given access to blocks of inventory at a set price. However, in both cases the ads are served and managed programmatically i.e. with the help of software.

Digital advertising will always be prone to change. But if you are willing to evolve with adtech, you’ll discover how efficiently technology can bring you results.