By Michael Shearer, Senior Director, Digital Strategy and Innovation, Claravine
Today’s advertisers are interested in making the most out of their first-party data and rightfully so. However, it’s no secret that there is heightened importance around being thoughtful with this data. When it comes to naming conventions and data inputs, if accuracy from data creators and channel marketers isn’t front and center, the entire organization will feel the disconnect. When accuracy and standardization are put in place throughout the implementation and analysis processes, the entire organization is able to make successful use out of the data insights.
Here are a few of the top tips on how data creators and marketers can maintain data integrity or data accuracy throughout their processes.
Manage Your Data with Strengthened Relationships
Implementing a better sense of relatedness and continuity between data from various sources can have a profound impact on how data overall is managed, stored, and utilized. While standardization should be a marketer’s first thought when going about this, it’s not just a matter of leveling the playing field amongst data that magically makes the system more cohesive in one fell swoop. The input that truly matters here is the marketer’s ability to create relationships between different marketing datasets – such as campaigns, digital asset libraries, etc. – and show how they can be interoperable with one another.
For example, a simple click-through on a digital ad can deliver additional detail to a customer’s record in say, a Customer Data Platform (CDP). When engineering correctly (both the link and the destination), all the metadata related to the campaign (e.g. creative, offer, audience) can be stored and then passed through to that person’s record in the CDP, enriching their profile with details for future personalization.
When executed the right way, there are a multitude of things that marketers can take advantage of – all because accurate data is now being managed and can be retrieved for various use cases.
Connecting Data Will Boost Optimization
With an organized, thorough management practice put into place with regards to marketers’ data, deeper and more precise use of analytics, measurement, personalization, optimization, audience building and so on, can be leveraged more effectively. As a result, channel marketers, data managers, and other concerned parties will begin to experience higher optimization that will in turn yield more positive effects that will improve the overall connectedness and efficiency of the entire organization.
In fact, when marketers improve the quality and interconnectivity of their campaign data, they are often able to find a greater return on ad spend (ROAS) of up to 10-15%. Through deeper dimensional analysis from the connection of campaign and creative metadata, insights can be found faster with the ability to adjust campaigns on the fly. A better connected and managed system of data will help to boost overall optimization.
Enrich The Consumer’s Journey with Metadata
Diving further into enriching the consumer journey, implementing metadata into data systems will help customers and marketers alike. Metadata – data whose purpose is to help describe other sets of preexisting data – make marketers’ accessible data more reliable and accessible. When implemented correctly, metadata that embodies the principles it’s meant to will assist in keeping all of a marketer’s data centralized. It then becomes an undeniable, single source of truth.
The digital journey of a customer can be significantly bolstered with the use of metadata. For example, if a consumer is looking for how-to videos on a brand’s site, they could use metadata categories to filter down the results to what is being searched for.
Whether it be on campaigns, site/app event tracking, dynamic site/app personalization, or another topic, successfully descriptive metadata enables better discovery, identification, and selection of resources that marketers have at hand.
With privacy-first data practices becoming standard in the industry, marketers are looking for other resources when it comes to gathering potent insights. Making sure that the relationships between data are as strong as they can be and utilizing certain categorical strategies such as metadata will ensure that channel marketers and data handlers can maintain standardized, accurate data.
