Expert: How to properly use 2nd party data

Second-party data strategies are largely executed programmatically; in the programmatic world, marketing strategies and performance metrics are often misaligned. How can brands ensure they are properly using 2nd party data?

by Kristina Knight

Kristina: How can brands ensure they are using second-party data in the right ways?

Steve Ustaris, CMO, ownerIQ: As with any marketing campaign, determining whether a tactic has been applied correctly should be based on its performance against your key performance metric. I truly believe that second-party data is a better option than third-party data in all use cases that leverage audience data, if you are applying it correctly. So if you are not achieving your objective, or performance metric, then chances are you have configured the campaign incorrectly. For example, you can't configure a second-party tactic to execute a top-line awareness goal, and then measure it against a CPA.

Kristina: What kinds of results has ownerIQ seen from the use of second-party data?

Steve: In the majority of use cases, the results have paid off on the promise. For retailers and the brands they sell, second-party data executions are pretty mainstream now. It's a natural evolution of their current marketing relationship. For these clients, second-party data executions are consistently the top performing display ad channel. Second only to first-party data executions. Many of these programs are achieving double-digit ROIs.

For all other programmatic marketers, second-party data has definitely boosted performance. In cases where reach against an audience is the objective, having data / audience transparency allows our client to achieve 100% data accuracy. Meaning, when the data source is transparent, marketers can choose audiences they feel are the most relevant to their target and can be assured their ad will be served to exactly that audience.

Even in the cases where our advertising clients are less interested in reaching the audience of one particular brand or retailer, and more interested in leveraging our entire "cloud," our ability to ingest data directly from the sources into our decisioning engine, versus routing through some third-party interpretation via a generic audience segment, has allowed us to create more sophisticated audience models to achieve very aggressive direct-response type performance.

Kristina: What makes second-party data so important to businesses?

Steve: It could potentially increase your prospecting pool 100x's over, with full transparency, and open up a whole new world of data analytics that goes way deeper that telling you what gender skew your audience is.