Are your digital audiences real? How to validate and optimise campaigns

Bots now play a larger role in global internet activity, outpacing real traffic in many online spaces. Thanks to AI tools, they’re also harder to detect. For marketers and digital media buyers, do you really know what you’re buying?

Third-party audience segments feel increasingly risky when you can’t see into the data sources, behaviours or attitudes behind the scenes. It’s even more challenging when consumer preferences and behaviours are shifting rapidly, making it tougher to know if you’re reaching the right people.

The solution: You need to validate your digital audiences.

The challenge of buying digital audiences

Accuracy, transparency and performance are vital when it comes to digital marketing for brands and agencies, but challenges like bots, risky data sources and third-party segmentation sources increase risk.

Transparency

Without a clear view of the data behind the audiences you build and utilise, it’s tough to have confidence in your performance. You may be able to select a target audience, but a lack of transparency into the actual profile means you’re taking a leap of faith.

You simply don’t know if lookalike audiences are modelled accurately or who you’re actually reaching.

Accuracy

There’s also a lot of bad data out there.

You might have access to a long list of data providers, and the segments look good… but how do you know whether they are high-quality? And how can you compare the digital audiences you’re buying to make sure they’re the right fit and not duplicated?

Performance

Effective campaigns require in-flight optimisation. Many times, marketers wait until the end of a campaign to evaluate performance. By then, your budget is spent, and you have no opportunity to make adjustments.

Without consistent optimisation, you’re just burning impressions. You need clear visibility into how your audience is performing in near real-time.

Why audience validation matters

Marketers will spend billions of dollars on digital advertising this year. Bots and fraud siphon off some of the effectiveness while poor targeting and campaign execution reduce the ROI even further.

Without audience validation, you are:

• Wasting your ad dollars
• Lowering your return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Making decisions based on inaccurate data
• Potentially damaging your brand

Validation provides a safeguard and gives you confidence that the people you’re trying to reach are who they claim to be.

Validation provides tangible benefits, including:

• Protects media investments: Validation prevents wasted ad spend that might otherwise go to click farms or bots. It helps ensure your ad dollars are going to real people.
• Improves performance: When your campaigns reach the right audience and align with your brand’s goals, you increase engagement and ROI.
• Helps you optimise confidently: Accurate data about who you’re reaching allows you to make in-flight adjustments to improve performance.
• Prevent damage to your brand: When your ad is served to a completely irrelevant audience, people may view your brand in a negative light. Marketers and media strategists must feel confident that the audiences they buy deliver real results.

How to validate your digital audiences

You need to be confident that the audiences you’ve built are the ones you’re actually trying to reach – and that they’re real. Here’s how we do it at Kantar Profiles.

Identifying the audience

To validate an audience, the first step is to define who should be measured – this could be audiences of profiles who have already been exposed to an advertising campaign, or it could be an audience that has been created for a campaign in a data management platform (DMP) or other modelling platform.

Matching

The next step is matching. Audiences are linked to the Kantar Profiles Respondent Hub either directly or through platforms like LiveRamp, InfoSum or other ‘clean room’ platforms. Kantar Profiles uses proprietary deterministic matching, meaning a direct match of a cookieless people-based profile with publishing platforms. This approach helps confirm the individual who was placed in the audience or was served the ad is the same person reached within the panel network. Matching is always anonymised to ensure privacy compliance.

Create test and control, and survey

Next, a lookalike control group is created to serve as a comparison to the matched audience test groups.

A survey instrument is then used to define your criteria and collect responses from the matched test audiences and lookalike groups. Through the matching step, we create a link between the audience to be validated and our panellists, and then through the survey, we measure whether or not the intended audience is being reached. The survey can also ask about awareness and gather metrics that optimise targeting and performance.

Analysis

Based on the test and control comparison, in- and out-of-audience scores along with weighted lift scores are calculated and serve as the basis for the audience validation. Once complete, marketers have a clear sense of the accuracy of their targetable audiences.

Validation timing

Validation can be performed before audiences are targeted, while a campaign is in-flight, or after a campaign:

• Pre-campaign validation provides an analysis of the quality of a pre-matched audience to guide a data buy or compare data providers before running a campaign.
• Post or in-flight campaign validation can be used to measure the accuracy of reach by leveraging matched ad exposure data for measured campaigns combined with analysis of the overall audience quality delivered.

The role of trusted partners

Audience validation requires a trusted partner.

Kantar Profiles provides high-quality data that has already validated thousands of audience targets. Integrated with many of the world’s largest publishing and advertising platforms, we offer trusted, transparent solutions to validate your audiences and ensure your campaigns reach real and relevant humans.

Stop wasting your ad dollars on bots or mismatched audiences. With audience validation, you can make more confident ad buys and improve performance.

Interested in learning more? Download Marketing Week and Kantar’s Marketer’s Manual report, ‘‘Three Proven Ways to Leverage Connected Data’, or use Kantar Profiles’ connected panel network to understand the quality and effectiveness of digital target audiences and validation. Get in touch now.  

Jason Dodge is managing director of global data solutions at Kantar Profiles.