Reach is all about accurately identifying and connecting with people online and offline, at scale. To have effective reach, you need to know how a vendor is connecting to people online and what they’re using to measure reach.
Ultimately, if you can’t reach your intended audience, you won’t get your desired marketing outcome, which will negatively impact your campaign. But, if you get reach right, you’ll can accurately identify your customers and prospects and send them the right messages, in the right place and at the right time.
Hear from Sara Stevens, VP of product management at Epsilon-Conversant and an expert on identity resolution, on three critical areas to explore when evaluating identity vendors on reach.
Video transcript:
(Sara Stevens) Marketers start out with a seemingly simple goal: I want to reach real people with my marketing message.
Reach is one of the fundamental components of identity resolution. When evaluating reach capabilities with vendors, there are three areas to explore.
The first is how a vendor defines reach. If a series of cookies and devices are connected to a real person, the reach metrics can be drastically overstated. Weak signals may cause these touch points to be over-clustered and multiple people maybe considered one person. And some of these people could be out of target, which leads to waste.
The second is the concept of active reach. This means that of those that may be matched, the reach number quoted may not truly represent if they can be recognized right now online and delivered a message.
Finally, over time, how effectively can you reach the same people? Methods that really solely on cookies and device IDs as a proxy for people have weak persistence, because these elements can decay over time.
One of the biggest problems we see in the marketplace is that sometimes vendors report that they can reach more people than are in a given category. If there are only 20 million people in a given category, but a vendor says they can reach 30 million individuals, they're likely identifying people using cookies or devices.
Ultimately, you need to make sure you're reaching real people. Don't be afraid to challenge vendors to provide in-depth examples of their identity resolution methods.
