Technological advancements have reshaped how advertisers, marketers, and founders access their target audiences in recent years. Artificial intelligence has led to better personalization, improved bidding strategies, and increasing ROIs.
Another area where technology is leading to improved outcomes is audience measurement.
In fact, without updated audience measurement technology, marketers would have problems with many modern digital audience measurement challenges. After all, media is becoming increasingly fragmented, and measuring the audiences within multiple channels is nearly impossible without updated tech.
Challenges in Audience Measurement for Marketers
Audience measurement has long been a challenge for marketers. Although technological innovation means the tools you need to address these challenges are available, the challenges themselves seem to be ever-evolving. Some of the core challenges marketers face today include the following:
- Media Fragmentation: It seems like new options for streaming, gameplay, news consumption, and any other form of media are popping up every day. Each one that does is taking its share of the market in which it lives, further adding to the fragmentation that’s taking place in media in general. This fragmentation poses challenges, as marketers need to consistently expand their reach across channels.
- The Demise of Cookies: Third-party cookies made it easier to track what consumers were doing in the digital realm. However, Google is set to phase these cookies out by 2024. As third-party cookies fall out of existence, marketers will face even more challenges as they work to track audiences across multiple platforms.
- Measuring Audiences Across New Forms of Media: New-age measurement solutions can’t simply focus on the audience size of each form of media you target. Instead, they have to be able to discern the overlap between media outlets.
Emerging Opportunities in Audience Measurement
Although many will focus on the challenges cropping up as the world of marketing continues to evolve, these challenges often become opportunities. For example, the demise of third-party cookies will likely bring about new audience measurement methods. Also, as marketers learn to track and measure audiences across various channels, they’ll gain more insights into their audiences, leading to improved advertising strategies. Read on to learn about the most significant emerging opportunities in audience measurement.
Predictive Audience Modeling: A Game-Changer for Digital Marketers
Predictive audience modeling is a relatively new concept made possible by AI technology. Predictive audience modeling can analyze your existing first-party data for behavioral signals, and cross-analyze it with significant, consented third-party audiences to identify and generate custom audience segments based on that behavioral data and likely buyer personas. For example, potential audiences may include the following:
- Audiences who are likely to make a purchase in the next 7 days.
- Audiences who are actively researching relevant products or services.
- Audiences with similar characteristics to those who have converted previously.
Predictive audience modeling gives you the data you need to determine how to reach the audiences you’re looking for effectively. This means you can tailor your advertising spending toward custom potential audiences who are most likely to become paying customers. You can also use this data to predict your marketing spending and ROI.
Advanced Algorithms: The Power of Data Science
If you’ve been in the field of marketing for some time, you’ve watched as the concept of data science has evolved. Just take a look at Google’s search algorithm. Early on, it was easy to manipulate Google. All you needed to do was stuff keywords into image alt text and throughout the content of your website, and chances were you would rank well.
Over time, Google has made many changes to its algorithm. Today, it’s one of the strongest in the world. The Google algorithm understands consumers’ questions and how to give the best possible result when a search happens.
Improvements in data science and the development of advanced AI-based algorithms are also great news for you as a marketer. You can use advanced algorithms to form a better understanding of your audience, target specific subsets of your audience, automatically update your bid to protect your budget, and much more.
Real-Time Data Analysis: Agile Decision-Making in Media Buying
In the past, when you wanted to understand how your advertising campaign was going, you had to wait days for the data. That’s not the case anymore. Today’s marketers operate in a realm of real-time data.
As you launch and work through your campaigns, you can see which assets are working and which aren’t in real time. You can also compare advertising rates for different ads, look into KPIs to determine the effectiveness of ads in real time, and more.
What does that mean for you?
It means you can make educated decisions on the fly. You don’t have to let a couple of weeks of advertising spend go to determine whether your campaign will be effective and what tweaks are necessary. You can do these things immediately, and AI-enabled tools can even automate this process for you.
Cross-Platform Measurement: A Holistic Audience View
Cross-platform audience measurement can be tricky, but believe it or not, it’s becoming easier by the day. Think about it: Today’s audiences stream their television services, making TV audience measurement more streamlined. Magazine readership is also easier to track online.
The problem is that you don’t want to have a separate social media measurement tool, Google measurement tool, and television audience measurement tool that all require separate dashboards and a manual process to integrate and compare performance results. It’s important to have tools that can work across platforms and aggregate data into a holistic view that provides transparency across channels so you can get all the data you need in one place.
First-Party Data Dominance: Unlock Precise Audience Insights
First-party data is the holy grail in the marketing industry. This is the data you collect as a company. You may collect this data through contact forms on your website, subscription sign-ups, or a wide range of other means. No matter how you collect it, first-party data is always more accurate than third-party data and, therefore, more valuable.
Why is first-party data so valuable? There are a few reasons:
- Data Precision: The first and most important reason is data precision. If you played the telephone game as a child, you know how a message can change as it makes its way through various parties. If you collect the data yourself, you can be sure there are no changes to the message it tells.
- Speed: You can instantly act on the data you collect. That means you don’t have to worry about the inaccuracy of that data as it ages in your database.
- Compliance: Privacy regulations are changing, and it’s becoming more important to be able to prove where you get your data from. When it comes to first-party data, you can be sure that your method of acquiring that data is compliant with current regulations.
AI-Driven Optimization: Revolutionize Programmatic Advertising
Artificial intelligence is one of the biggest advancements we’ve seen in advertising in decades. AI-driven optimization makes it possible to:
- Define Customer Personas: Personalization is becoming more and more important in any advertising campaign. Artificial intelligence makes it easier to understand your audience and define customer personas that are meaningful to your marketing efforts.
- Customize Ads: Defining your customer personas is only half the battle. It’s also important to appeal to those personas in your marketing campaigns. Artificial intelligence makes it easier to do so. In fact, AI makes it possible to customize your messaging for each buyer persona, sending the right messages to potential customers at the right moment.
- Informed Decision-Making: AI can process vast amounts of data in no time flat. That creates an opportunity. When you can assess large amounts of data quickly, you can make on-the-fly marketing decisions, improving your ROI in the process.
Enhanced Personalization: Predictive Models for Engaging Audiences
Advertising personalization has changed significantly over the years. In the good old days of snail mail advertisements, most advertisers only cared about the audience age and location. Soon, things like audience gender became important. Fast forward to today, and the best approach has become a personalized approach.
Today’s audiences expect marketing messages to speak to them, almost literally. If they don’t, the target audience quickly loses focus on the message.
The good news is that, with improved audience measurement, marketers can learn more about their audiences today than ever before. As a result, they can create predictive models to determine how engaging the ads and messages they develop will be. This makes it possible to personalize ads for a wide range of buyer personas and serve your messaging where it’s most effective.
Voice-Based Audience Measurement: Voice Interactions
Artificial intelligence isn’t just helping marketers reach their target markets and audiences. It’s also helping consumers find information quickly, make phone calls, and even turn the lights on in their living rooms. If you have an Alexa or Google Nest in your home, talk to Siri on your iPhone, or say “Hey Google” when you want a question answered, AI assists you in your day-to-day life as well.
This has led to an entirely new way for consumers to access the information they need and for you to access the consumers you need.
According to Forbes, about 50% of people use voice search daily. That means it’s becoming increasingly important to not only measure but also address voice-based audiences. As a marketer, it’s becoming important to think in terms of how your audience will say things rather than type things and consider the size of audiences behind natural language keywords.
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR): Immersive Experiences
Do you remember being a teenager thinking about what the world would become? Artificial intelligence was coming, and someday you’d be able to play video games that made you feel like you were really there — no matter where there was!
Well, those predictions have come to fruition.
Virtual reality and augmented reality are real things. Virtual reality headsets can make you feel as though you’re in the middle of a battle in a Roman Colosseum or diving into unheard-of ocean depths. Augmented reality can change how you look and sound or adjust the visuals around you.
But it’s not all fun and games. There’s an opportunity here.
AR and VR give you the opportunity to create immersive experiences and show your products off to potential customers like never before. Not only can you tell your audience about what you have to offer, but you can also create virtual experiences that educate your audience on why your product is superior. Not only is engagement within these interactive formats significant in forming brand affinity with consumers, it’s also easily measurable.
Reach and Convert the Right Audience With AI-Driven Data Science
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and emergent technologies are at the core of every audience measuring tool and opportunity mentioned above. The simple fact is that AI-powered tools are capable of combing through vast amounts of data at lightning speed, giving marketers more insight into their audiences than ever before. But new solutions continue to emerge constantly as the landscape evolves and privacy regulations change. As a marketer or business owner, it can be valuable to work with an adaptable partner who can help you stay ahead of the curve.
That’s why AUDIENCEX continually works to explore, test, and integrate new technologies into our suite of privacy-safe tools that can help address the evolving needs of advertisers navigating this shifting landscape. AUDIENCEX Intelligence (AXi), our AI-driven suite of privacy-safe data science solutions, can help you understand your existing audiences while expanding into new segments that are most likely to convert. With custom algorithms, every media buy integrates a vast number of data points to ensure that your specific campaign goals are being prioritized correctly to get the most out of your spend. Once live, ongoing optimization automatically leverages real-time data to ensure that your campaign adapts to maximize performance throughout its lifecycle.
All of these tools are holistically leveraged throughout the digital landscape by our expert strategists, further empowered by tech-driven creative that helps to drive audience engagement, and monitored carefully by our advanced Analytics & Insights team. With end-to-end campaign management and full-service advertising solutions, our team works to democratize access to these advanced tools and ensure that brands and agencies of all sizes are positioned to compete effectively no matter what the future brings.If you’d like to learn more about how we can help support your needs, please reach out to speak to one of our specialists today. We’d love to explore what we can do for you.