Are You Using 3rd Party Data to Maximize Attendee Acquisition from Online Ads?

1st party data, such as site visitor data which you collect by “cookie-ing” people that visit your web site, can be very beneficial in attendee marketing by enabling you to retarget people interested in your show.

However, 1st party data is only part of the equation i.e. it enables you to talk to people you already know.  What about the others… people that don’t know your event, have not visited your web site, etc.?

That is where 3rd party data comes in. 3rd party data does not come from you or the web sites on which you advertise but rather from 3rd party data providers that gather anonymous data from various online and off-line sources, including cookies placed on major web sites that they have relationships with.

These data providers enable you to acquire data which can be paired with RTB ad buys to cost-effectively target potential attendees at scale across 1,000s of web sites – and build your audience/cookie pools much faster than you can by relying only on 1st party data.

Data overlays are being used for an increasingly larger share of the tens of millions of online impressions we buy for events, and we have been impressed with the ROI here.

While we use data in a variety of ways to enhance online advertising tasked for attendee acquisition, in the most simple terms, we divide our 3rd party data/ad buys into two buckets…

Pre-Defined Segments: We buy audience/cookie pools that 3rd party data providers have classified into specific marketing segments i.e. Art Enthusiasts, Luxury Good Buyers, Fashion Lovers, etc. based on web site visitors’ actions such as browsing content, searching, etc., and/or other data sets, which best fit with an event’s target audience.

Custom Segments: We also create our own custom audience/cookie pools which best match an event’s attendee profile by employing 3rd party geo-demographic, interest and behavioral data.

1st and 3rd party data each offer powerful and distinct benefits on their own, but when used together they can help you develop a more integrated 360 degree audience targeting plan.

Posted on April 4, 2014