Custom Audience Data

What is Custom Audience Data?

Custom audience data represents a list of uniquely identified customers that is created by digital marketers. These customers usually have a previous interaction with the business. This data is made up of information called identifiers that are collected about the customers and may consist of contact information like email, phone number and physical residential address. As such, custom audience are groups of individual web users which have a pre-existing relationship with your business.

How is Custom Audience Data collected?

When you collect and provide information about your potential customers on social media platforms, before putting it to use, these websites does what they call ‘hashing’ of this information. After this, they then apply a process called ‘matching’ to match this hashed information with potential profiles that identify with it. It works in such a way that the more information you provide about the targeted users of a given social media platform, the higher your chances to achieve a better match rate.

What are the typical attributes of Custom Audience Data?

Custom audience data can be grouped into various types, each of which consists of uniquely identifiable characteristics. Custom audience data from customer lists allows you to build on the pre-existing relationships you may have with customers that are not identifiable by site engagement or pixel mapping. To safeguard the privacy of your potential clients, you can only upload data from customers who have given the consent to market to them. Custom audiences from your website allow a pre-installed social media pixel on your site to gather information about the customers who visit your website and match them with their profiles. Custom audiences from your mobile app are created for people who use your app.

What is Custom Audience Data commonly used for?

The core purpose of custom audience data is to enable you to tailor your social media adverts to specific people who have shown interest in your business. Custom audience data can help you remarket to your previous clients. Remarketing is a method used to remind your previous clients about products or services they were previously interested in, thus inspiring them to make a final crucial decision of buying the product or service. Additionally, custom audience data can help you reach out to the already existing clients who have previously bought a service from you. Repeat clients already know your brand. You can take advantage of this fact to foster much higher conversion rates by reminding them that you are still available to sell your product or service.

How can a user assess the quality of Custom Audience Data?

The quality of custom audience data can be assessed by five-point criteria; source, mechanism, methodology, freshness and price. Knowing the origin of the data is one way to assess its quality because it has a direct bearing on the extent of transparency. The mechanism entails the means through which the data is powered in terms of the primary technology behind it. Methodology on the other hand assesses the means through which this data was obtained. It is important because it has a direct bearing on the accuracy of the data. Freshness refers to when the data what collected. Lastly, the value of the data is determined by how useful it is for your business needs. So to decide whether the price attached to the data means it’s worth investing in, always ask your custom audience data provider for a sample to see whether it works in practice.