As reported by eMarketer, “Data management may be becoming more important for marketers, but it isn’t getting any easier.” The marketing landscape is saturated with data providers and while many players tout their capabilities, it begs the question, how do know which partner is right for you? We’ve put together a list of questions that you should ask when considering a data partner.

According to IAS, “As fraud investigations ramp up in 2019, media buyers will be under increasing pressure to ensure that they’re buying genuine human impressions from transparent sources. Being able to authenticate your own inventory, understand quality levels across your properties, and hold any traffic partners accountable will provide a huge advantage in conversations that will be increasingly quality driven.”

Anything from bot traffic to domain spoofing where certain fake ad spaces are sold as premium inventory, is not limited to the delivery side of RTB advertising. You should also consider the data that informs any audience segments you are purchasing. Filtering out inaccurate data is crucial to creating performant audience segments.

OUR SOLUTION — Dstillery targets humans, not robots. Through the use of two bot prevention patents, we can ensure that our data is clean, bot free and represents true human behavior. We discard ~70% of the location data we process due to inaccuracies, so you can be confident in the quality of your audiences.

2. WHAT DATA ARE THE AUDIENCES BUILT FROM?

It’s not enough to identify a good versus a bad prospect, nor is it even enough to just understand the characteristics of a good prospect. To truly design an effective marketing strategy, you’ll need to understand the variety of stories and motives that bring customers to your brand, and then identify the different segments of people behind each of those stories. You need a complete picture of the consumer journey.

OUR SOLUTION — Dstillery extracts intelligence from a combination of both online and offline data – including desktop, mobile and location data to match a consumer’s digital journey with their physical actions. Our proprietary cross-device technology, CrossWalk, uses probabilistic matching to match location device data to consumer behaviors. This is not simply cross-screen delivery, which is an important distinction. These are comprehensive audiences built using data from online & offline actions from over 300 million robust user profiles in our reference data set. Combined, this data paints a robust picture of the consumer journey, giving marketers the power to more accurately predict how people will behave.

3. IS THE AUDIENCE BUILT & SIZED APPROPRIATELY TO DRIVE PERFORMANCE?

The goal of reaching the holy-grail of marketing: the right customer, at the right time, with the right message, isn’t a new phenomena. Marketers know that consumers don’t stay in-market forever and as best practice, it would benefit you to remove them before you run your campaign against them.

OUR SOLUTION — We observe users over time, score and rank them daily, and then qualify them both into and out of audience segments based on expected performance and propensity to convert. Scoring and ranking against performance ensures that we are running against well-built segments – not a box of cookies – that will drive results for your business KPIs. We apply strict qualifiers to our audiences to ensure the people in them are still valuable.

4. DO YOU HAVE INSIGHTS TO VALIDATE YOUR AUDIENCES?

More data does not automatically result in better insights. Ensuring that your data partner can provide you with insights on your audiences allows you to learn about your current customers, potential new customers, and seamlessly activate these new audiences through your DSP of choice.

OUR SOLUTION — Audience Studio gives you a comprehensive dashboard of the different nuances of your consumers, updated on a daily basis. You may even find audiences that surprise you. For example, a luxury women’s clothing brand hadn’t realized that many of their shoppers were also planning trips to New York City, Portugal and France.

5. HOW TRANSPARENT ARE YOUR AUDIENCES?

A 2017 Forrester report found that 8 out of 10 marketers are frustrated with the lack of visibility into their audience data. Your provider should show you exactly what goes into your audiences. This includes the original seed set, websites your customers frequent more than the average U.S. consumer, other audiences that index highly against it, which sites they predict it will perform and where those users are going in the physical world.

OUR SOLUTION — We provide all of this information in our Insights Portal, which is refreshed daily. Uncover how your current site visitors are spending their time, who they are similar to, and more. Our data is refreshed daily so you can be confident that the audiences are currently in-market.

6. HOW CUSTOM CAN I GET WITH MY AUDIENCES?

Audiences are not a one-size fits all solution and your data partner shouldn’t treat them as such. Every client has their own unique audience and targeting requirements and sets of data, so your data provider should accommodate your campaign objective.

OUR SOLUTION — Our Client Success team will strategize with you to help create audiences and provide insights on how you can best reach your target. Leveraging our Audience Studio, you can mix and match any number of 1st Party segments with Dstillery segments to create the perfect balance of your target audience. Pick and choose from over 3,000 existing audiences to reach your target at scale or create your own.

7. ARE YOU GETTING HELP WITH YOUR AUDIENCE STRATEGY & EXECUTION?

It’s not enough to have clean, quality and custom audience data if you don’t have a solid activation plan. Your partner should not only assist in audience creation and recommendation, but also help with activating your segments in your DSP of choice.

OUR SOLUTION — Dstillery’s dedicated Client Services team will provide campaign-level recommendations for all Dstillery clients. We pair our expertise with the data science that fuels the Explore feature of Audience Studio to inform these recommendations and then guide you through activating these audiences on a wide variety of DSPs, including Adobe Audience Manager and The Trade Desk.

8. HOW IS CONSUMER PRIVACY PROTECTED?

Data providers should take privacy very seriously. When understanding consumer behavior, it is important to note that good, quality data doesn’t have to violate any kind of privacy issues. Using data that is anonymous and transparent, as well as ensuring it doesn’t violate PII standards (personally identifiable information) is key to aggregating and understanding behavioral patterns of audiences rather than specific individuals.

OUR SOLUTION — We’ve created technology that drives the performance of online ads while knowing as little about the user as possible. It’s privacy by design. As a data science company, we analyze patterns of behavior, not people. We don’t capture PII like name, address or username, and we don’t build personally descriptive profiles. Instead we assign an anonymous, unique device ID to each web browser and mobile application to understand consumer behaviors.

9. ARE THESE AUDIENCES CREATED BY A TEAM OF INDUSTRY LEADERS?

You should feel confident that your data partner has a positive reputation and is a leader in their field.

OUR QUALIFICATIONS — At Dstillery, we live and breathe data science. We have 15 data scientists and 24 engineers in house and hold the rights to 10 patents, making us industry leaders in brand safety, fraud detection, machine learning automation, location-based audiences and geodata authenticity.

To learn more, email contact@dstillery.com