Understanding target audiences in Ad Platforms (Google, Facebook and LinkedIn)

Overview

As a marketing manager, you are probably already using several advertising platforms to reach your prospects and customers.  These advertising platforms provides a rich treasure trove of data to narrow down your audience, but limiting targeting to only your target accounts is hard and you may not be doing this at scale.

The CDP now offers native connectors to most major advertising platforms that automates the process of managing the audiences to target your target accounts.

With these connectors, you should expect

1. Lower media $$ on users not in your target market while increasing ROI on leads from your target accounts.
2. Increased audience size   
3. Increased productivity from your media teams as it is easier for them to manage audiences at scale  

How do we create audiences on Ad platforms?

Most ad platforms provide API to enable platforms like the CDP to create an audience from a list of your accounts or contacts. The ad platform connectors uses these API to automatically create audiences from segments built in the CDP. 

The ability to create these audiences vary across advertising platforms. The table below is a breakdown of the supported Advertising Platforms and the fields that the CDP sends.

Note: The CDP performs transformations on customer data before it is sent to your Ad Platform to optimize your campaign activation. Data is hashed to ensure security using industry-standard SHA256 algorithms and fields are automatically mapped to their corresponding identifiers in your Ad Platforms.

It is recommended that all Contacts have their respective Contact Location fields appended. These fields are: City, State, Zip Code, and Country (2 letter country code instead of country name).

Audience Reach Expansion

Activating your target lists of accounts from the CDP for your ad campaigns will improve ROAS with your ideal prospects, and a larger audience size in your Ad Platforms will improve your outcomes.

The CDP can add additional information about your contacts to improve match rates thus increasing your audience size and expanding the breadth of targets you can reach across your channels.

The more data we have about the contact it is easier to find a corresponding match and add additional data. The table below shows the projected match rate based off of the data inputs from the Contacts in the CDP, and with D&B's data enrichment applied.

The following diagram highlights how a contact record gets enriched with the B2C mapping.