Online Advertisers Only Know 50% of What They Think They Know

Data driven marketing is the future. There’s no doubt about it. The more you know about your prospective customer the better, right? Well…yes that’s right. But only if what you “know” is correct.

A recent survey performed by first party data company Enliken showed that 50% of marketing data is wrong. Here’s an infographic based on their results.

You can take the survey yourself if you don’t mind exposing a little bit of data.

I took the plunge. Here’s what the survey looks like.

It’s basically a series of assumptions based on your cookies. You can then tell them if it’s accurate and whether or not it’s private. As I went through it responding to it’s accuracy I could remember exactly which sites I went to that might have produced these results. Some data was spot on. While other data points couldn’t have been more wrong.

Here were the results of my survey. As you can see the data they had on me was MORE than 50% wrong.

Conclusion

In a world of data driven marketing you’ve gotta be careful which data you’re using.  It’s clear that 3rd party data has some accuracy issues.  So what does it all mean?

While 3rd party data may not be 100% it’s much further along than just a couple years ago.  On a practical level it means that you need to test the audiences you buy carefully. Test small sets of audiences.  By reducing the number of data points a particular audience may have you reduce the risk of the data being bad.

For example.  If you buy an audience through real time bidding it’s possible to get extremely detailed.  You could choose to advertise to women in the 90210 area code that drink red wine, and drive an Audi.  While that’s incredible we can see why that may not be practical.

Go a bit broader.  Try just advertising to women in the 90210 area code instead.   Test, tweak, and improve.