How to Make the Most of Your 1st-Party Data

Video

Nitin Rabadia, Marin Software's Director of Audience Marketing, discusses how organisations can manage 1st party data in order to maximise its potential and how you can analyse customers onsite behaviour more effectively.

This video is a clip from "Global Mobile Trends - How to reach, influence & convert in-the-moment customers" - watch the webcast on-demand.

Typically, today, when we think about how you use your first-party data, it's very raw, shall we say, it's very young. People normally use this for what people call "retargeting", which has got a bit of a bad rep to it, because what it sounds like it does, is just target people who are looking to buy or likely to buy with a horrible looking ad that follows them around the web and doesn't care about the customer experience.

But that isn't the way you should be managing your 1st-party data, and today there's definitely more and more opportunity to do this in a much smarter way, and it starts with understanding what we call pre-visit intent. So, if you think about every search click and every search keyword, what do we know about those users? We discussed some of those general categories earlier, that can help us to understand how we then remarket to this user, with our first-party data. So, bringing in that search data, the type of keywords, the type of group that user belongs, is going to help us to drive that next engagement.

The same can be said for social, affiliate, display partners - anything that drives a user to your website should be part of the data that helps you make the next decision. And that also includes if they belong to your CRM, if you know that that person's on the website as a previous website user, you might engage them differently.

So think about that previous intent, and then what they actually do on the site. So, if they came by a very expensive paid search click, but then spent less than 3 seconds on the site, do you think you want to spend any more time on this user? Do you think that user was in the right place when they landed on your website, or potentially, it was not what they were looking for?

There is a number of on-site activities that can help you to understand both the value of that user - how much they could possibly spend or what type of user they are - but also the intent: how likely are they to buy with more engagement, how likely are they to convert with you. By understanding these two things, value and intent, you can start to create some really smart strategies.

There will also be some data on delivery, so when you do start actually targeting these users; do they prefer to see an advert on desktop or mobile? how soon after they leave your site should you start showing them ads? which publisher should you show them, etc.