How Data Ageing Could be Affecting Your Online Marketing Efficiency
Data is one of the pillars of the digital marketing industry. Every technology provider spent most of 2013 talking about it and every brand spent most of 2013 trying to work out how to get it, and now we’re all wondering what we should do with it. As an industry, digital advertising relies on data.
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Part of the growth of online advertising, particularly throughout the financial crisis, has been the ability to deliver targeted campaigns to the right audiences, measure campaign success and concretely show ROI, all powered by data.
So given our love affair with data and what we can do with it, it surprises me that very few people are talking about data aging. Depending on the campaign objective, data gains or loses value over time. However most marketers never query data age or how that may possibly impact a campaign.
Probably the most commonly discussed use of data is behavioral targeting. Although most tech providers implement cookie lengths (a particular span of time after which the cookie stays on the individual’s machine), the cookie gets dropped at a particular point in time and judges the individual on that particular point in time until the cookie expires. Does it consider where the individual might be in the purchase process and how time might have affected their move down or out of the purchase funnel?
Building a digital advertising campaign around data that is no longer relevant impacts the potential results. Is that individual still in the market for trousers or, after visiting the trousers section for a week, are they now looking at the shoes section of your website? Does that indicate that they’ve made a purchase? How quickly does a cookie with a three-month lifespan pick that up?
In computer sciences, there is a great saying: “Garbage in, garbage out”. It’s used when talking about computers unquestioningly processing unintended data, but this easily applies to digital advertising as well. If you are still serving a dynamic display advert for trousers on the person now looking for shoes, you are definitely not going to see a great result.
Similarly, this impacts the digital advertising industry as a whole. We pride ourselves on being transparent, on being able to show results and ROI, so when campaign results aren’t successful there is nowhere to hide. By running inefficient campaigns, the entire industry loses credibility and becomes the other 50 per cent of the John Wanamaker quote.
But what I find most worrying is that marketers aren’t asking about data aging. I’m frequently asked about what data we use and what third party partners we work with, but I’m very rarely asked, if ever at all, about how we handle the data ageing, which makes me think that it’s not a serious part of the agenda.
The digital industry has made leaps and bounds in being able to deliver the right message at the right time but without considering what we know about the individual and how quickly that changes, we jeopardize our ability to stay.
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