We at Keane Media Group are big believers in the power of unstructured data, and how Simpli.fi lets us use it to our clients’ advantage. Over 30,000 active advertisers are currently leveraging Simpli.fi’s programmatic platform to drive higher performance on their digital campaigns. Why? Because Simpli.fi’s unstructured data network allows advertisers to extract more value from audience and campaign data than traditional audience segment-based platforms. In fact, they performed a study to prove just how successful their approach to data can be for clients and their programmatic campaigns, which can be downloaded below.
Why the Effectiveness of Segments is Limited
Audience segments are made up of what is called “structured data”. Structured data is information that has been scrubbed, organized, and lumped into prepackaged categories. It has been placed into a nontransparent audience segment – a digital black box of sorts – and sold to marketers and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) as indicative of potential consumer behavior. Examples of pre-packaged audience segments would be “auto intenders,” “high-income retail enthusiasts,” etc. Prepackaged audience segments have significant limitations when it comes to programmatic marketing.
Simply put, prepackaged audience segments lack transparency. This is because, with audience segments, advertisers have no way of knowing what the specific data elements within the segment actually are. Some of them may be relevant and useful to your campaign, some not—there’s no way to know. This means you’ll never know which specific data elements are working well and which are not. And if the campaign doesn’t perform well, you won’t know why.Finally, there’s the question of optimization. While campaigns that use prepackaged audience segments can certainly be optimized, this can only be done at the segment-level. Meaning, if optimizations do not perform as expected, the advertiser is out of luck.
There’s a Better Way
When utilizing unstructured data, advertisers don’t select from a pre-packaged menu of audience segments. Rather, they use individual data elements, including both online data points – such as contextual content, keywords searched, browsing behavior, domains visits, apps used, site search history and more – as well as offline data points, such as GPS location, to create a custom audience for their campaign, optimizing along the way with the same element-level control.
With Simpli.fi, advertisers can tap into unstructured data in real-time, resulting in dynamic audiences. As advertisers learn more about what is working and what isn’t, the audience evolves with the campaign. Advertisers can target dynamic audiences with pinpoint precision, right down to the exact mix of desired individual data points. This is next to impossible when using audience segments because you have no idea what data points justified putting certain users into the segment in the first place. What’s more, unstructured data lets advertisers optimize in real-time throughout the course of a campaign based on what is working and what is not working to minimize wasted impressions and drive higher performance.
Download the Campaign Performance Analysis report, and see the data and analytics from thousands of advertisers on the platform to see the overall performance of programmatic campaigns when using unstructured data as compared to those that use pre-packaged audience segments. You’ll get to see exactly how these advertisers have successfully met their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with the use of Simpli.fi’s unstructured data.
