The Winning Combination: How Data-Driven Paid Media Campaigns Drive E-commerce Success
A data-driven mentality has always been the backbone of my digital marketing success.
Knowing all of your data touchpoints can have a massive impact on your campaign, especially as it pertains to e-commerce and online advertising. Combining these two marketing components helps create a winning combination to drive better cost per results goals and more importantly, return on investment (ROI) / return on ad spend (ROAS).
In this article, we’ll explore the power of leveraging first-party data to supercharge your paid media campaigns and drive e-commerce success.
Before we get started, let’s discuss two critical components that will help set the table for the data sets we’ll discuss later on:
first-party data & audiences.
WHAT IS FIRST-PARTY DATA?
First-party data is information that you collect directly from your customers or website visitors. This info is essential to your strategy and allows you to make informed marketing & even business decisions.
As it’s related to e-commerce, it can help you better understand your customers' preferences, behaviors, and purchasing habits. By using first-party data to support your paid media campaigns, you can deliver targeted and personalized ads to those customers who are more likely to convert.
WHAT ARE AUDIENCES?
There are 2 types of audiences: custom audiences & lookalike audiences
Custom Audiences
A custom audience is a group of people who have already interacted with your business or brand. This could range from visiting your website, clicking a link, making a purchase, subscribing to your newsletter, watching a video you posted, etc.
You can create custom audiences by importing data sources into your ads platform (e.g. email addresses or phone numbers) and/or utilizing in-platform data sources you’ve already generated (e.g., video views, post engagement).Lookalike Audiences
A lookalike audience is a group of people who share similar characteristics to your existing customers. This allows you to expand your reach beyond your core audience and target new prospective customers who are more likely to be interested in your business or brand.
To create a lookalike audience, you first need to create a custom audience. Once you’ve built a custom audience, the ad platform will find people who “look like” your customers and have similar interests, demographics, and behaviors. This can be a powerful way to target new users who are more likely to convert.
By targeting these audiences, you can reach people who are already familiar with you and are more likely to engage with your ads. This is a productive tool to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your advertising efforts and drive better results.
Now that we’ve learned about first-party data and audiences, let’s dive into the data touchpoints you can start utilizing to help drive your online advertising objectives.
3 KEY FIRST-PARTY DATA SOURCES YOU SHOULD BE UTILIZING
In-Platform Data
Social media and advertising platforms provide advertisers with a wealth of data on their audience including metrics such as demographics and behavior.
Example: if you sell workout clothes, you can use interest-based data the ads platform provides to target people interested in fitness and popular athletic brands.
However, leveraging your own first-party data can further help refine your targeting. You can build custom audiences from individuals who have interacted with your content through video views, profile visits, or engagement with your posts or ads.
Additionally, you can create lookalike audiences from these custom audiences to expand your reach even further to similar individuals who are more likely to be interested in your product or service.Email / SMS Lists
Chances are you’ve started collecting email address and/or SMS (phone number) subscribers (if you haven’t yet, don’t worry. We’ll discuss email marketing in a future article). Ad platforms allow you to take this data, upload it, and create highly targeted ads towards your subscribers.
Segmenting your list based on interests, behaviors, or purchase history can deliver relevant ads that speak directly to your end user.
Example: if you have a list of customers who have bought vinyl records in the past, you could create a segmented audience of past purchasers to target your latest album release.
You can also create lookalike audiences from this data to expand your reach.Pixel Data
A pixel is a small piece of code that you add to your website or URLs to track user behavior. By analyzing pixel data, you can gain insights into how users interact with your site and use this information to optimize your paid media campaigns.
Example: you might notice that users are frequently abandoning their cart on the checkout page. This could be an opportunity to retarget customers who have abandoned their cart to keep your brand top of mind or even offer a discount code to encourage them to complete their purchase.
Similar to the two other first-party data sources above, you can create lookalike audiences from your pixel data to help increase your pool of potential leads.
CONCLUSION
By utilizing these three first-party data sources, you can create highly targeted and personalized paid media campaigns that help drive better e-commerce success. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg and one element of creating an effective paid media campaign.
Coupling the tactics above with a cohesive digital marketing strategy has helped me generate an 88.66x Return on Ad Spend for an artist’s solo project with a minimal ad budget.
