Audience Targeting Budgets to Increase by an Average of 38% as the Influence of the 3rd Party Data Ecosystem Grows
New York, NY – eXelate, the leading smart data and analytics engine powering smarter digital marketing decisions, today announced the results of a comprehensive survey conducted in conjunction with Digiday. The State of the Industry survey captured feedback from over 650 digital advertising professionals on the importance of audience targeting in launching high-performance direct response and branding digital campaigns. Respondents represented a wide range of industry stakeholders – advertisers, agencies, ad networks, ad exchanges, and demand side platforms (DSPs). The research was driven by the ongoing need to reduce the complexity of the ad-tech ecosystem by providing clarity to the real demands of advertisers and agencies.
A surprising survey insight included the fact that both advertisers and agencies preferred 3rd party online data as the #1 source of audience targeting data over 1st party social media, 1st party custom, and 3rd party offline data for both direct response and branding campaigns. This result confirms that the audience targeting ecosystem continues to rely on accurate and actionable 3rd party data pools to power effective audience targeting campaigns.
“Despite the ongoing debate on 3rd party cookies and data, it is clear that all parts of the digital advertising ecosystem – advertisers, agencies and platforms, increasingly rely on, and prefer the efficacy and reach of, 3rd party data,” stated Khurrum Malik, Chief Marketing Officer of eXelate.
Key highlights from the eXelate and Digiday State of the Industry survey include:
· Audience targeting continues to grow with more than 80% of advertisers and 90% of agencies, ad networks, ad exchanges and DSPs utilizing the capability
· Over 60% of advertisers prefer 3rd party online data for audience targeting, followed by 1st-party CRM data
· Over 80% of the ecosystem reports that audience targeting is an effective marketing strategy
· 3rd party online data is the highest ranked data set for both direct response and branding campaigns for both advertisers and agencies, outperforming 1st-party social, custom and CRM data, as well as 3rd-party offline data
· More than 69% of respondents report they plan to increase their audience-targeting budgets, with an average budget increase of 38%
“Digital marketing and media professionals want higher-performing campaigns that deliver measurable and improved ROI. Audience targeting continues to play a critical strategy for achieving these goals. Targeting audiences with an accurate, actionable, and agile 3rd party data set enables marketers to reach potential customers with highly relevant messages,” stated Mr. Malik. “With over 80% of the ecosystem having a positive view of audience targeting effectiveness, we expect continued investment in audience targeting, especially 3rd party online data sets, across all platforms in both direct response and branding campaigns.”
The research also highlighted increasing momentum for platform-centric audience targeting. Smartphone and tablet platforms were utilized for audience targeting by greater than 50% of respondents – fast approaching the 75%+ for PCs. Full survey results can be found at eXelate.com.
About eXelate
eXelate is the smart data company that powers smarter digital marketing decisions worldwide for marketers, agencies, platforms, and publishers. eXelate’s smart data platform provides accurate, actionable, and agile data and analytics on online household demographics, purchase intent, and behavioral propensities. Through the collection of trillions of directly measured online data points and distribution partnerships with information leaders such as Nielsen, Nielsen Catalina, MasterCard Advisors, Bizo, and more, eXelate makes online, offline and custom modeled data sets actionable across 500M online consumers worldwide. As members of the NAI, IAB, trustE, Council for Accountable Advertising, OPA and Evidon’s Open Data Partnership, eXelate is a leader in privacy compliant advertising practices. For more information, please visit http://www.exelate.com.
