Experian received top ranks for hashed emails (HEMs) and demographic data from Truthset Data Collective
Advertisers, technology partners, and agencies are all chasing accurate data to power their marketing strategies. Turns out, not all data is created equal and unless you’re working with the right partner, high-quality data can be hard to find. That’s because accuracy can vary widely across the industry and the partner you choose is important. A recent study conducted by data validation company Truthset showed that 51% of the data used for ad targeting and audience measurement is wrong, with average accuracy rates ranging between 32%-69% across data providers.
The data quality challenge
The lack of high-quality data poses multiple challenges in the advertising world:
- Wasted ad spend: without accurate data at the start, marketers can’t reach the right audiences, resulting in wasted impressions.
- Privacy and compliance: in an increasingly privacy-centric world, advertisers need to be especially mindful of accurate targeting to avoid putting their brand reputation at risk.
- Poor campaign performance: low-quality data skews metrics and attribution models, making it difficult to measure campaign success and optimize spend.
Low-quality data can come in different forms like inconsistent or outdated information – think demographics (age, gender) and interests (dog versus cat lover) or simply the wrong relationship can be made between datasets. Data records can be incomplete or duplicative and data segments could be misclassified or inaccurate. For example, a kids snack food company may think they’re targeting a 35-year old man, who lives in the suburbs with his young family when in fact it’s a 65-year-old woman who moved to the city after her kids went to college. It’s wasted dollars!
Build the data foundation
Data quality needs to be addressed if advertisers and advertising technology partners want to fulfill consumers’ demand for personalized marketing. Per eMarketer, more than 75% of internet users worldwide said they were willing to share their email address, brand interest, and name in exchange for personalized experiences. Without accurate data, marketers won’t be able to provide the level of personalization that consumers desire.
Validation can help advertisers evaluate third party data and help build trust across the ecosystem. Companies like Truthset review and provide an unbiased evaluation of data fidelity and quality on a regular basis.
“As cookies and mobile ad identifiers continue to phase out, consented, durable identifiers (hashed email, postal addresses) are going to serve as the foundation for identity solutions of the future,” said Chip Russo, President at Truthset. “And the only way to ensure you are transacting on the highest quality identity and demography data is to actively validate the data you rely on with a third party.”
Not all data is created equal: Experian leads the way
In Q3 2023 Truthset reviewed Experian’s marketing data – as well as several other large data providers – and found:
- Experian is the #1 data provider in terms of largest volume of high-accuracy hashed e-mails (HEMs) with demographic data
- Experian ranks #1 in accuracy for 15 marketing data attributes, including but not limited to Age, Gender, Home Owner/Renter, Geography, Education, Presence of Children, and Pet Owner
- Experian consistently has the largest number of HEMs with demographic data that are 90% or more likely to be accurate
“As a member of the Truthset Data Collective, Experian received top ranks across a variety of categories for its data,” continued Russo. “The entire digital advertising world runs on data, but focusing on data accuracy is going to drive the next phase of innovation for the industry, enhancing ROI for advertisers, CPMs for publishers, and relevant experiences for consumers.”
As Truthset’s recent study highlights, the data matched between hashed e-mails and postal addresses is crucial, underpinning everything from targeted ads to TV audience measurement. Highly accurate HEMs linked to high-quality demographic data should be the foundation of any marketing plan. Advertisers are able to overcome the complexities of identity resolution by tying online and offline touchpoints together to deliver a consistent message across channels.
Companies are striving to eliminate marketing waste and provide consumers with personalized marketing and the advertising industry can have confidence that Experian’s marketing data has been externally validated as being highly accurate. The accuracy of our data will power smarter marketing initiatives, like insights, targeting, identity, and measurement.
Let’s start a conversation about how we can fully realize the potential of data-driven advertising together.
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Facebook has become a cultural phenomenon over the years and an object of affection for marketers to connect with its users. Experian Simmons has put together 10 consumer behavioral stats based on their National Consumer Study and New Media Study about the social networking site leading up to its Friday IPO launch: 39% of Facebook users say “this website gives me something to talk about.” Top 3 reasons Facebook users visit social networking sites: 86% to keep in touch with friends 72% for fun 66% to reconnect with/find people they’ve lost touch with 78% of Facebook users have shown support for a group or business on a social networking site. 34% of Facebook users have played games on a social networking site. Among those: 73% play social games (like Farmville, SIMS social, etc) 68% play casual games (like Bejeweled, etc) 73% play games on a social networking site once or more a day 28% of Facebook users with cell phones and 42% of Facebook users with a tablet computer have downloaded a social networking app for the device Adult residents of the following Designated Market Areas (DMAs) with 1,000,000 or more adult residents are the most likely to have visited Facebook in the last 7 days: ) Seattle-Tacoma, WA Austin, TX Salt Lake City, UT Portland, OR Washington, DC 15% of Facebook visitors follow a musical group on a social networking site, 14% follow a TV show, 11% follow a newspaper or news outlet and 4% follow a magazine. The average Facebook user is 39.3 years old. The average Facebook user claims an annual household income of $69,900 with annual household spending on discretionary goods and services of $15,500. Hispanic users of Facebook are 55% more likely than non-Hispanic users to say they like to follow their favorite brands or companies on social networking sites. Don’t miss 15 stats about Facebook, previously posted on the Experian Marketing services blog. . For more information like the data provided above please download the Experian Marketing Services 2012 Digital Marketer report.
Today, it costs more than $40 to send a five pound package from the U.S. to Canada or Mexico. The cost to Europe or South America is even more expensive. For U.S. companies operating on a global scale, such as retail specialists or ecommerce organizations, address accuracy is crucial. Organizations can’t afford undeliverable mail and packages due to a wrong address – the total cost would be unmanageable. Mistakes happen frequently, whether it is an error by the company or the customer. If a mistake is made, companies can’t ask the customer to cover delivery fees, leaving the organization with the bill. Retailers must also consider potential delays due to long distances and custom checks. Altogether, address errors result in a poor customer experience and a decrease in efficiency. Implementing international address verification will save money, time and improve the customer experience. By combining primary address data from national postal authorities with partner-supplied data, businesses can verify international addresses from countries all around the world.
On April 22nd, Americans and many of their terrestrial counterparts in countries around the world will celebrate Earth Day, a tradition that was started in the United States by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970. Much has changed on the planet since the first Earth Day, and even in recent years attitudes continue to evolve when it comes to our outlook towards the environment. In 2007, Experian Simmons created the GreenAware consumer segmentation, which classified respondents to the Simmons National Consumer Study between 2005 until 2007 into one of four mutually exclusive segments based on their consumer behaviors and attitudes toward the environment. Since then, Experian Simmons has continuously classified all adult respondents into the GreenAware segments providing our clients with valuable insights into the evolution of the environmental movement. The four GreenAware segments are: Behavioral Greens: This group of people thinks and acts green. They have negative attitudes towards products that pollute and incorporate green practices into their lives on a regular basis. Think Greens: This group of consumers think green, but don’t always act green. Potential Greens: This group neither behaves, nor thinks along particularly environmentally conscious lines and remains on the fence about key green issues. True Browns: They are not environmentally conscious, and may in fact have negative attitudes about environmental issues. Since 2005, we have observed a nearly constant increase in the percent of U.S. adults who are classified as Behavioral Greens, the “greenest” segment of the four. Today, 33% of adults are Behavioral Greens, up from 27% who were classified as such in 2005. Meantime, Think Greens have maintained an almost perfectly constant 21% share of the population. The size of the True Browns segment has also remained constant at between 14% and 15% of the total adult population. The Potential Green segment, however, has steadily declined in market share from 39% in 2005 to 31% today. La Vida Verde Hispanic Americans have traditionally been ahead of the curve when it comes to green thoughts and deeds and they’re only getting greener with time. Today, 39% of Hispanic adults are Behavioral Greens, up from 33% in 2007. Just 32% of non-Hispanic adults are Behavioral Greens today, up from 29% who fell into the greenest segment in 2007. Interestingly, among the True Browns segment there are virtually no Hispanics to be found, and, in fact, while the True Brown population is actually growing among non-Hispanics, Hispanics are increasingly moving to greener segments. Specifically, just 1.3% of Hispanics are True Browns today, down from 8% who registered as such in 2007. By comparison, 17% of non-Hispanics are True Browns today, up from 14% in 2007. Green Today, Greener Tomorrow? The illustration below shows the alignment of America’s largest metropolitan areas with the four GreenAware segments today and in 2007. We see that residents of the San Francisco-, New York- and Miami-areas are the most likely to be in alignment with the Behavioral Green mindset today. Denizens of Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston tend to fit more closely with the Think Green set that has green attitudes and intentions, but not always the actions to back it up. But things are changing. In fact, since 2007, we’ve seen that as local minds change, some cities become aligned with a different, often greener, segment. Let’s look at Chicago, for instance. In 2007, Chicagoans’ environmental outlook was more reflective of a mix of Potential Greens and True Browns. Since then, local attitudes have changed so much that Chicago-area residents are now more aligned with Think Greens and Behavioral Greens. Likewise, Cleveland, which was clearly a True Brown town in 2007, now falls in step with the Potential Green segment. In five years’ time, who knows? Cleveland could be America’s next green leader. Not brown now towns Looking at markets large and small with the biggest drop in concentration of True Browns, we see that attitudes in inland markets located in Gulf States have become disproportionately less brown since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. In fact, seven of the ten Designated Market Areas (DMA) that saw the biggest decline in the percentage of their population classified as True Browns between 2007 and 2011 are inland markets in states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. While the oil didn’t directly reach these markets, the attitude change did spread: For example, 3.2% of adults residing in the Columbus-Tupelo-West Point, Mississippi DMA today are classified as True Browns, down from 19.3% who were categorized as such in 2007. In Macon, Georgia, while not a Gulf State, a more impressive shift took place. In 2007, the Macon, Georgia DMA had the fourth highest percentage of its population classified as True Browns (20.1%) out of 209 DMAs. Today, only 5.8% of area residents are True Browns, which makes it the market with the 10th lowest concentrations of True Browns in the nation. Macon still has one of the lowest shares of residents who are Behavioral Greens in the nation, but what a difference a few years makes. While the towns directly in the path of the oil spill are not among those with the biggest relative decline in True Browns, area residents’ attitudes did take on a greener hue since the spill. Today, 8.4% of residents in Panama City are True Browns down from 17.3% in 2007. Likewise, only 9.8% of adults in both the Mobile-Pensacola and Biloxi Gulfport DMAs are True Browns down from 17.3% and 19.0%, respectively, who fell into the least green segment prior to the spill. Learn more about Experian Simmons consumer segmentation offerings