Audience Curation: Are You Weeding Out Faulty Audiences?

With programmatic advertising gaining popularity, many marketers think converting to this targeting strategy will automatically increase their campaign’s performance. While programmatic advertising is substantially more productive than old-fashioned endemic techniques, it still requires regular weeding and watering.

Programmatic advertising allows marketers to hone in on interested car buyers, shrinking the audience to exclusively contain pre-market and in-market auto-intending consumers. Advertisers can access massive quantities of audience segments offered on data management platforms, then buy and leverage these segments to shrink their advertising universe. This carves out the uninterested audiences and removes the need to guess where desired consumers are.

Although this method is far more effective than endemic or untargeted advertising, many audience segments on DMPs are inaccurate, out of date, or completely incorrect. Many advertisers are missing out on the full potential of streaming advertising by running their campaigns with targeted, but unfiltered and underperforming audience segments. Programmatic advertising requires audience curation to function optimally, and the only way to weed out poor audience segments is to test run them in advertising campaigns and optimize from measured attribution data.

With thousands of automotive audience segments available, there’s competition among audience providers for business. Marketers are typically drawn to large audience pools because they believe that makes it easier to deliver their budget in full. This incentivizes audience providers to produce attractive-looking, large audience segments. Thus, audience providers have no incentive to remove expired users from their data pool because they want to keep their audience large enough to deliver against.

For automotive, this looks like an audience provider keeping an in-market car buyer, who was 30 days from buying a car at the time of entry, in their audience segment for 2 years. These expired users were once in-market for a car, but no longer are; serving ads to them is meaningless. A large audience does not automatically mean it is a high-quality audience. The quality of the segments depends on the accuracy of their users, which is often hard to detect initially. Finding and curating these quality audience segments is a complex process.

To address issues with data accuracy, EMG rigorously audits its selected audience segments to ensure all users align with the appropriate stage of the customer journey. This involves verifying that users are within the correct time frame from their anticipated car purchase and are actively progressing through market cohorts to remain part of EMG’s audience groups. Constantly monitoring the age of these consumer segments is crucial to avoid displaying ads to outdated or irrelevant users. Ensuring that advertisements reach the right audience is vital — these are the individuals who generate sales and increase foot traffic. By meticulously cleansing and curating audience pools, campaigns can effectively target the right, engaged viewers.

To properly evaluate the impact audience segments have on campaign lift, it’s crucial to first examine the base performance rates. The par response rate for car buyers is 2.75%. This means that around 2.75% of any given population will be in-market for a car in any given month. If an automotive ad was delivered to ten thousand untargeted people, and 275 people who saw that ad bought a car that month, that campaign had no genuine lift— those 275 people (2.75%) would have purchased a car with or without seeing an automotive ad. To generate genuine lift, the campaign’s media efficiency must be above the 2.75% of the population who are buying a car nonetheless. In an honest campaign evaluation, 2.75% efficiency is really 0%, or the starting point.

Through 6+ years of audience auditing, EMG has evaluated and eliminated 99.8% (over 10,000) of the commercially available automotive audience segments offered on data management platforms. Only the top performing audience segments are currently leveraged in our targeting solution, and many of those chosen segments are still internally filtered to some degree. As a result, EMG Audiences contain the most hyper-targeted, highly predictive auto intending audience segments available that consistently generate the highest conversion rates and media efficiency for their time cohorts.

How Are Automotive Audiences Curated?

Simply put, EMG looks for deviations from the par response rate (2.75%).

• EMG analyzes each audience segment and eliminates audiences with conversion rates aligning with the par response rate. EMG only keeps segments that generate substantially more conversions than the 2.75% of the population already buying a car.
• Additionally, EMG keeps the audience groups at an optimal size for budget delivery and continuously adjusts the segments’ filters to fit the cohort’s time horizon. These filters eliminate expired users who have not been removed by audience providers.

EMG’s average media efficiency, or conversion rate, is 35%, meaning EMG is at least 8.5x more efficient at serving media to the right people than an untargeted or poorly targeted campaign would generate (a flat 2.75%).

EMG’s Audience Cohorts: Considering the Customer Journey

EMG’s audience cohorts include pre-market, in-market, and conquest consumers. These audience groups reflect the consumer journey, finding users at each stage of the car-buying process, whether they know they are about to buy a car or not. EMG finds indicators of pre-market individuals based on life changes and car-buying history, follows them through their in-market stage as they actively search for vehicles, and finally if they are considering other dealerships in the conquest stage. EMG regularly evaluates and filters our audience segments to ensure they accurately represent the customer journey. We find these audiences exactly when they are of value, predictive of their exact timeline to vehicle purchase.

Advertising programmatically doesn’t guarantee an automatic increase in car sales or website traffic. Many of these audience segments are flawed and include expired users. Adequate time and thorough auditing are essential to identify the optimal audience configuration through campaign attribution optimization. EMG excels in media efficiency, with 35% of our campaigns’ targeted households visiting a dealership in a given month on average, compared to the national average efficiency of just 2.75%. EMG generates at least 8.5x the average campaign lift by ensuring our audiences only contain active and interested auto intenders.

Want your streaming campaigns to deliver to highly curated and predictive automotive audiences? We know how. Get started today.