In an age where consumers openly share about their relationships, locations and interests across the digital landscape, it’s easy to understand why 58% are annoyed by ads they don’t need (Marketing Charts). At one time or another, we’ve all been unable to resist clicking on that cute kitten and have received irrelevant ads for catnip for weeks. Creepy, right?
88% of US consumers claim they have been “inundated by digital spam,” and 9/10 say this has led them to take actions ranging from leaving a website to boycotting the company (Marketing Charts). Leading brands are turning to first-party login data to strike a balance between privacy and personalization, swapping unreliable and underhanded third party collection techniques for rich, permission-based insights that can be used to inform more relevant ad campaigns.
Here are 3 ways that first-party login data can improve your advertising efforts by helping you better tailor and target ad placements and messaging, and the steps you can take to get started.
Getting More Ad Revenue
Giving users the option to easily login to your site or app using their existing social media accounts not only makes them more likely to authenticate their identities, but it also gives your brand permission-based access to rich data housed in their social profiles. With insight into individual users’ relationships, interests, locations and more brands are able to provide users with more engaging and personalized experiences. Socially logged-in users view 66.7% more pages and spend 56% more time on site, making sites that feature social login top targets for advertisers.
Furthermore, these insights enable your brand to better match ad placements with your unique audience. Your customers will appreciate being served more relevant ads, and your rate cards will skyrocket along with advertisers’ confidence that they are reaching the right audience. In a recent Total Economic Impact of Gigya study, Forrester reported a 50% increase in ad revenue for two major publishing brands in just one year after implementing Gigya’s first-party data collection and management suite.
Connect the Dots
On the same token, first-party login data can also be used to help brands improve their own placements and go beyond traditional retargeting techniques. Many marketers still rely on cookies to piece together customer profiles by tracking their on-device activities across the web, failing to verify identity until the point of transaction. Clearly, this strategy was not made for today’s connected consumer landscape, with 67% of online shoppers admitting to having recently made a purchase that involved multiple channels (Zendesk).
By capturing user identity at site entry, brands are able to more effectively reach and retarget consumers with highly relevant and timely ad campaigns regardless of channel or device. In addition to informing campaign messaging, insight into users’ favorite brands, media preferences, locations and more helps you determine the publishers and placements that will most effectively reach your best customers and desired audience. Goodbye, pesky catnip ads!
Expand Your Audience
Login data does a lot more than help you nurture existing customer relationships and reach your target audience – it can also reveal untapped and unintuitive segments to expand your business. Tying social profile and behavior data to direct revenue allows you to take these insights to the next level, isolating common interests and actions of users driving performance. You can then develop campaigns and look-alike segments to reach consumers with similar profiles that are most likely to convert.
For example, a fitness club may discover that the majority of consumers logging in to its mobile app are moms – not the twenty-something iron-pumping college students it assumed. This brand could then shift ad budget to promote placements across children’s clothing and daily deal sites, urging moms to “take some time for themselves and get fit.” It may then uncover that the moms with the highest member registration rate also love the show Real Housewives of Orange County, and decide to run a commercial on Bravo.
Powering Ads with First-Party Data: Your Checklist
First-party login data is the key to unlocking an advertising strategy that reaches consumers with the most relevant and impactful placements possible. Here’s a checklist to help put you on the path to more relevant advertising:
Give users a convenient way to authenticate their identities on your site or app
Implement a database that can capture and aggregate first-party data across channels and devices
Leverage a web-based dashboard that transforms opt-in data into actionable insights
Tie profile and behavior data to purchase activity to identify the unique traits and behaviors of consumers driving revenue for your business
Export these actionable insights directly to your existing third-party marketing platforms to inform your ad campaigns
For more information about how to forego 3rd party cookie retargeting techniques in favor of first-party login data, download our survival guide: Marketing in a World without Cookies.