While data has always been a vital part of successful advertising campaigns, thanks to the rise of digital display advertising, it has now become the most essential tool in marketers’ arsenals. As digital display advertising delivers data on click through and conversion rates, marketers are provided with tangible evidence about the level of engagement with their campaigns.
This not only enables them to evaluate consumer response and tailor activities accordingly, but as a result of the introduction of real time bidding (RTB), advertisers will soon be able to use conversion data to bid on conversion rates rather than just impressions, truly maximising the success of their campaigns. Thanks to data’s ability to dramatically improve advertisers’ ROI and publishers’ revenues, it has now become exceptionally valuable; so much so that leading marketers are now asserting that, for the digital world, it’s a resource as powerful as oil.
Using data to develop engaging content
With more brands than ever competing for potential customers’ attention on desktops, smartphones and tablets, consumers are finding themselves inundated with streams of online incentives and adverts. This barrage of content means it is more vital than ever before that brands ensure their message is tailored to meet a user’s individual requirements, so that it stands out from the crowd. By using data to display personalised content based on an individual’s interests, advertisers are able to communicate an interesting and relevant message to the user, increasing the likelihood that the user will want to engage.
As well as using data to personalise content, thus increasing engagement and click-through rates, data can be used to build an understanding of a target demographics’ behaviour and buying habits. Through acquiring this data, advertisers are more likely to develop campaigns suited to their target audience, resulting in improved engagement.
Monitoring Engagement
In addition to using data to create engaging content and campaigns, digital display advertising offers tangible results on the level of engagement. Thanks to statistics on click-through rates, conversion rates and visit duration, marketers are able to monitor how successful their campaigns are. This in turn helps to ensure that unsuccessful strategies or campaigns can be edited or dropped, helping to maximise advertisers’ ROI.
Data is at the heart of RTB’s advantages
Whilst advertisers using digital display platforms have always been able to monitor engagement in the form of click-through rates, the introduction of real-time bidding (RTB) in recent years has completely changed the landscape thanks to its ability to use conversion data. RTB enables advertisers to truly maximise the success of their campaigns by ensuring that adverts reach the most relevant consumers and subsequently generate excellent conversion rates.
Data is at the heart of RTB’s advantages, as it utilises conversion data to automatically place bids on traffic that is most relevant to the user, resulting in greater engagement, and leading to both increased click-through rates and improved quality of clicks. RTB lets advertisers determine who they want to target, and bids are then automatically placed on these impressions, helping to ensure that an advertiser’s message reaches the desired audience quickly and efficiently.
With a network model that doesn’t operate on RTB, advertisers are restricted to targeting users on certain advertising networks. By contrast, RTB’s exchange approach grants advertisers access to a much larger inventory, opening up access to a far greater amount of traffic, and meaning that advertisers no longer need to rely on picking and choosing where they run campaigns. Instead they can choose the impressions best suited to their campaign from a much wider pool. By ensuring that the targeted audience is reached in this way, advertisers are not only able to improve the number of clicks but also their quality, resulting in higher overall conversion rates.
With conversion data at the heart of RTB’s success, mobile monetisation platforms have been able to support advertisers in further increasing the ROI of mobile campaigns. MobileWebAdz, for example, has developed a unique algorithm which works out the relationships between clicks and impressions and subsequently how likely a banner is to be clicked upon. By adopting this approach, MobileWebAdz has been able to ensure that advertisers are only bidding on high performing impressions. Poorly performing adverts can be dropped, helping to further enhance the success of campaigns. This allows ads to be served in the most effective way, optimising advertiser conversions as well as the number of impressions a publisher can make money on. RTB can then be used to match how much the advertiser is willing to pay per impression, based on specific targeting parameters.
RTB dramatically improving the importance of data
In today’s digital age, data can be used to underpin display advertising campaigns by personalising adverts to meet a user’s specific requirements, increasing both click through rates and quality of clicks. In addition, when this personalised content is coupled with RTB, advertisers can not only get data on the level of engagement with each campaign, but can use this data to track conversion rates to ensure that only the highest performing impressions are bid on, improving the success of their campaigns.
Thanks to the huge advantages RTB affords both advertisers and publishers, it has gained rapid momentum across the web, growing faster than any other digital advertising segment. In the US alone, RTB spending is predicted to grow from $2 billion in 2012 to $14.4 billion by 2017 at a CAGR of 49%. Moreover, having previously been the domain mostly of desktop, mobile advertisers now are beginning capitalise on the benefits of RTB thanks largely to new standardisation protocol.
With RTB gaining rapid traction and more and more advertising exchanges adopting the approach, data looks set to become an increasingly valuable asset for marketers. Thanks to its ability to increase revenue and generate engagement it’s clear that, like oil, data can be harnessed to help build success. Perhaps we will therefore also start to see associated price tags for the handling and analysis of data rise, making it a highly prized commodity.
