Introduction
First Party Data (1PD) stands at the forefront of today’s marketing conversations, offering a wealth of opportunities for brands eager to deepen their connection with consumers. In my experience, people’s focus usually goes immediately to targeting use cases, however in reality brands should be developing a holistic 1PD data approach across strategy, planning, activation and measurement. Let’s explore these critical angles and how they come together to elevate your marketing efforts to new heights.
Customer Insights & Segmentation
Before diving head first into any paid media or marketing campaign, it’s crucial to take a step back and define your strategic objectives clearly. 1PD offers unparalleled insights that enhance both the upstream strategic planning and the downstream media activation stages.
Understanding who your customers are, their behaviors, interests, and current product or service usage is clearly valuable for maximising revenue from existing customers. However, this data can also simultaneously power new customer acquisition strategies. This dual approach empowers you to develop audience segments that are directly aligned with business objectives paving the way to more seamlessly link marketing efforts with tangible business outcomes.
This potential is drastically amplified when enriched with ID graphs. Data unification between 1PD and the broader addressable universe is a goldmine for media planning across the entire marketing funnel. Enrichment via real identity ensures deduplication of reach and provides insights into real individuals, unlocking the power of predictive analytics to ensure media is delivered to the highest value individuals across every touch point at scale. The success with which this can be done very much depends on the scale and accuracy of your ID graph and ability to connect this to multiple data sets.
Finally, this combination of rich audience segmentation via deep understanding of consumers combined with 1PD enrichment with ID graphs unlocks a new form of creative planning that is truly intelligent in that you have the potential to understand the exact creative, message or experience that is most likely to deliver a desired business outcome across every touchpoint. With advancements in A.I. this formula can be rolled out at an unlimited scale and unprecedented speed.
Exclusions
Having navigated numerous First Party Data (1PD) projects in the media & marketing world, I truly believe that exclusions are the unsung heroes of the 1PD toolkit.
Firstly, what do we mean by 1PD exclusions? Essentially, they empower you to fine-tune your audience by filtering out specific segments. This ensures your marketing efforts reach their intended targets with precision, without any unnecessary rebounding or wasted impressions.
Why are they the unsung hero, you ask? Well, implementing exclusions is usually more straightforward compared to often more cumbersome processes like targeting and data enrichment. Yet, their simplicity should not be confused with insignificance. Exclusions can dramatically heighten campaign efficiency and precision.
The simplicity lies in the minimal legal hurdles they present. Unlike other marketing practices, exclusions can often be implemented under the ‘legitimate interest’ clause of GDPR, meaning we can use data to serve our company’s interests without requiring explicit consent – anyone who has worked on 1PD projects in media will appreciate the advantage of this!
In terms of application, use cases can be far more versatile than simply ‘exclude all customers from Performance campaigns’. Think about when you need to exclude recent purchasers, customers ineligible for certain promotions or low ARPU customers.
The magic doesn’t stop there. Exclusions help deftly navigate the often-tricky waters between brand marketing, performance, and retention efforts. By reducing audience overlap, we can better prevent annoyances like message fatigue and wasted resources— A well known challenge in many organisations that I wrote about in way more detail here.
Assuming there’s a solid strategic rationale grounded in marketing principles—and there almost always is—1PD exclusions are a no-brainer. They offer a straightforward yet powerful way to refine your campaigns and maximize their impact.
Targeting
As mentioned above, leveraging 1PD in marketing for targeting purposes is probably the first use case that comes to mind for many. Whilst I admitedly put a lot of emphasis on looking beyond just this use case, it is of course a massive opportunity that also needs to be explored and maximised.
Key considerations include: evaluating match rates, assessing the size of your audience pool, and analyzing the type and quality of your data, as well as the platform where you’ll activate your media.
One risk to watch out for is inflated CPMs when activating 1PD segments. Establishing a robust testing methodology to demonstrate incrementality compared to the business-as-usual approach is essential. This process should be incorporated into the insights & segmentation phase to mitigate potential pitfalls when it comes to activation and testing further down the line.
Another consideration is that using 1PD segments as the audience layer in your digital media campaigns might affect the effectiveness of platform AI and bidding tools. Many platforms (namely Meta, TikTok, YT) require sufficient scale to leverage machine learning effectively, so this is also a factor to consider.
If match rates, scale and CPMs are proving too much of a headache, consider applying 1PD segments to your owned media strategy first (such as customizing website landing pages). This approach won’t impact media CPMs, but once proven successful, it can enhance the effectiveness of all website visitors from both marketing and direct or other sources.
Measurement
Navigating the complexities of modern media and marketing measurement has become increasingly challenging. Privacy regulations, the decline of third-party cookies, and the reluctance of major platforms to share data from their walled gardens mean robust cross-channel measurement demands greater effort. While 1PD isn’t a complete solution, it plays a pivotal role in enhancing data quality and helping validate and refine existing data models.
In a cookie-depreciated landscape, leveraging Conversions APIs should be a top priority. These APIs facilitate a direct connection between your server data and platforms like Google, allowing for real-time, accurate capture of conversion events. This process bypasses the limitations of cookies, enabling (otherwise impossible) precise attribution and greatly improving analytics insights.
Another powerful measurement strategy is to use holdout groups within your First Party Data to assess the impact of your digital marketing efforts, particularly concerning retention and customer engagement. By intentionally excluding a small percentage of your audience from all campaigns, you create a control group that serves as a baseline for comparison. It’s important to note that this method requires a long-term perspective (!)
Finally, access to a robust and scaled ID solution can significantly amplify the effectiveness of your 1PD measurement techniques. By unifying data, ID solutions enable the creation of detailed audience segments based on cohesive 1PD, allowing marketers to assess campaign effectiveness and glean insights into customer behaviors. This is an area I will explore further in an upcoming post.
Closing Thought
Mastering First Party Data (1PD) is not merely a trend but a crucial step in crafting a well-rounded and effective marketing strategy. By exploring beyond traditional targeting, embracing exclusions, leveraging conversion APIs, and utilizing robust ID solutions, brands can not only enhance their measurement capabilities but also significantly improve customer engagement and campaign efficiency. As the marketing landscape continues to evolve, those who adeptly adapt their 1PD strategies will find themselves leading the charge. Hit subscribe for more insights as we delve deeper into these transformative practices in the future.
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