Why Are Savvy Event Marketers Using CRM Retargeting?

Cookie-based retargeting is a very effective visitor marketing tool but it is much less effective in the mobile environment.

Here’s why… (1) a cookie is tied to a single browser on a single device, (2) cookie functionality varies by device/OS, and (3) cookies don’t work across mobile environments (a cookie in an app can’t share data with another app or a web browser on same device).

With people spending an increasing amount of time on mobile, and using more and more devices, relying strictly on cookies limits your advertising capabilities.  Simply put, the more devices your attendees use, the less reliable cookies are in matching them across the web.

To address this challenge, savvy event marketers are onboarding their CRM data, such as email addresses, to their retargeting platform or other data/ad serving partner.  The data onboarding process anonymously matches this data to third party browser cookies and mobile IDs in a privacy-compliant manner and yields a unique digital identifier for each match that works across desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets and browsers.  The matched data sets can then be activated for a variety of use cases.

Here are some of the reasons that we use CRM retargeting in combination with cookie-based retargeting to buy tens of millions of ads around the world for our clients’ exhibitions and events.

Larger targetable audience. By onboarding your audiences, you can deliver display ads to potential attendees who are not being reached by your retargeting because they are no longer in your cookie pool – they cleared their cookies, they haven’t visited your site for a while, etc.  CRM retargeting also enables you to serve ads to attendees who registered at your event and gave you their email but never visited your site.

More control over reach and frequency. Cookie-based retargeting enables you to reach attendees only on the device you placed the cookie when they visited your site so you miss opportunities to reach them on their other devices.  With CRM retargeting, you are able to reach matched audiences across multiple devices, and gain more control over ad delivery because cookies overstate reach and understate frequency.

Better measurement. Cookies don’t allow you to fully measure online interactions and conversions when multiple devices and browsers are involved in driving a ticket sale because attendees can be represented by multiple cookies or none at all.  By using a more stable online identifier, CRM retargeting provides better visibility on performance, enabling you to more effectively allocate ad spend and reduce media waste.

As media consumption continues to fragment across so many devices, it is becoming increasingly important to activate your CRM data in addition to cookies to maximize results from retargeting campaigns.

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Posted on July 18, 2017