Have you wondered how the shift toward real-time data is reshaping the way companies connect with consumers? Traditional methods of third-party data collection and demographic targeting are being replaced by more privacy-conscious approaches. In our next Ask the Expert segment, we explore how Experian and Captify’s partnership is harnessing the power of real-time onsite search data to enhance personalized advertising, address identity fragmentation, and provide valuable insights for navigating modern advertising challenges.
We’re joined by industry leaders, Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify, and Chris Feo, Experian’s SVP of Sales & Partnerships. In this segment, they discuss the complexities of identity and the innovative use of real-time data in digital advertising. Watch the full Q&A below to learn more about these topics and discover how the collaborative efforts of Experian and Captify are shaping the future of personalized advertising.
Understanding the power of real-time marketing data
Real-time data provides an up-to-the-minute view of consumer behavior, enabling marketers to make quick, informed decisions. Captify’s use of real-time search data allows for immediate insights, contrasting with traditional third-party data, which often involves delay and prompted answers. This approach allows marketers to see trends and reactions as they unfold, making it possible to tweak campaigns and strategies and always reach the most in-market consumers. By using Captify’s real-time data, we can predict consumer interests and adapt to market changes quickly.
Staying ahead of market trends with predictive analytics
Captify analyzes more than a billion search signals daily, giving brands a detailed look at changes in audience behavior. These real-time insights help businesses make timely adjustments and reach their audiences in the moments that matter. Beyond digital media, Captify’s multi-channel activation strategy extends to platforms such as connected TV and digital out-of-home, ensuring messages remain relevant and effective.
How Experian and Captify work together
Imagine being able to tailor your ads to consumers’ needs and interests in real time. Our partnership with Captify enhances ad targeting and measurement by combining Experian’s vast Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data. “Captify has evolved beyond relying on third-party cookies in isolation and now uses the Experian Graph to provide a more holistic view of identity at both the individual and household levels” says Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer at Captify.
As privacy concerns grow, we have built and continue to invest in a signal-agnostic Digital Graph that can make connections across a wide range of identifiers, including the Experian Living Unit ID (LUID). The LUID is a unique identifier representing each household in the United States, based on real households and real people. This allows essential demographic information to be enriched to a household, enriching first-party data with detailed consumer insights, like age, gender, historical purchase behavior, and future purchase intent. By continuously adding new data and building fresh audiences and segments, we provide greater insights into the consumer base. Our Digital Graph serves as Captify’s identity spine, allowing them to connect identifiers together at both the person and household levels. This helps their clients target ads more accurately across different channels, making it easier to track and understand consumer behavior across platforms like TV, digital, and radio.
Here are five key ways our partnership enhances ad targeting and measurement:
Enhancing personalized advertising with real-time insights
Identity fragmentation is a challenge for marketers because consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Experian and Captify’s partnership provides the fuel to help advertisers by integrating real-time search data with identity graphs, allowing for accurate targeting across various channels. By combining Experian’s robust Digital Graph with Captify’s real-time intent data, advertisers can deliver highly personalized ads on connected TV that retain their relevance and impact, no matter where the consumer engages with the content.
“We ingest the Experian Graph as part of our internal Graph, allowing us to connect identifiers together at both person and household levels, which aligns with our expansion into TV, out-of-home, and audio channels.”
Amelia waddington, chief product officer, captify
Addressing identity fragmentation
A fragmented identity occurs when consumer data is scattered across different devices and platforms, making it difficult to effectively understand and target consumers. Advertisers need holistic media plans instead of fragmented strategies that risk disengaging consumers, while publishers must demonstrate their platforms’ value by targeting seamlessly.
By enriching and distributing thousands of demographic and behavioral segments, Experian provides the essential data needed to effectively target diverse audiences. Experian’s Digital Graph complements Captify’s data by connecting various identifiers, providing a complete view of individuals and households. This approach helps advertisers overcome fragmentation challenges, and ensure their messages reach the right audience across multiple touchpoints.
Optimizing creative content dynamically
Using real-time data, advertisers can adjust creative elements of their ads to better match consumer interests. This means changing parts of an ad, like images or text, based on current audience data, making it more relevant to the consumer. By partnering with Experian, Captify continues to see a rounded view of a consumer, allowing them to provide clients around the globe with data-driven creatives. These creatives achieve better results than standard ones and enable more meaningful connections with consumers.
Integrating search data into connected TV
Real-time search data plays a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of connected TV (CTV) advertising. Captify’s identity solution uses persistent identifiers from the Experian Digital Graph to extract value from onsite search data. Machine learning technology then categorizes these searches to understand consumer intent and create highly relevant audiences. By integrating Captify’s consumer intent data, advertisers can deliver more targeted and relevant ads on CTV platforms. This integration helps marketers reach viewers with content that resonates.
Ensuring multi-channel message consistency
Consistency in messaging across multiple channels is key for maintaining brand integrity and consumer trust. By using Experian’s identity data, Captify ensures that advertisers can deliver cohesive messages across various platforms, including TV, digital, and radio. This integration not only enhances ad targeting precision but also solidifies the brand’s presence, ensuring that every touchpoint reinforces the same core message for a unified brand experience.
Watch the full Q&A
Visit our Ask the Expert content hub to watch Amelia and Chris’ full conversation. In their discussion, they cover identity beyond identifiers, personalized advertising strategies, and the evolving consumer journey. Amelia and Chris also share about interoperability challenges in CTV and how Captify is using alternative IDs like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2).
About our experts
Amelia Waddington, Chief Product Officer, Captify
Amelia is Chief Product Officer at Captify, leading the Product, Engineering, Partnerships and Insight teams globally. During her three years at Captify, Amelia has delivered on her product vision to put Captify’s Search Intelligence in the hands of all advertisers—unlocking competitive advantage for clients and partners in a way that’s omnichannel, strategic, open and future-proof. She has launched Captify’s Advanced TV, cookieless and data partnerships product lines. Amelia brings over a decade of experience in driving product strategy, underpinned by expertise across data science, machine learning, and analytics. She has a PhD in computational neuroscience and previous roles include product leadership at LiveRamp and Aimia.
Chris Feo, SVP, Sales & Partnerships, Experian
As SVP of Sales & Partnerships, Chris has over a decade of experience across identity, data, and programmatic. Chris joined Experian during the Tapad acquisition in November 2020. He joined Tapad with less than 10 employees and has been part of the executive team through both the Telenor and Experian acquisitions. He’s an active advisor, board member, and investor within the AdTech ecosystem. Outside of work, he’s a die-hard golfer, frequent traveler, and husband to his wife, two dogs, and two goats!
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In 2013 and beyond, marketers will have to work even harder to gain and maintain position in organic search results. They’ll also need to spend more effectively on paid search ads by knowing how their target customers use search, and by applying insight into their behaviors and attitudes to plan and execute better content and campaigns. Here’s an excerpt on the search landscape from the upcoming 2013 Digital Marketer Report: Five Websites captured 20 percent of all search activity in Q4 2012, while the top 500 captured nearly 50 percent. Expansion to the top 1,000 Websites reached nearly 75 percent, highlighting the challenges for marketers to reach potential customers through search, even for those with a large Web presence. Top five Websites to capture search clicks Websites Domain Q4 2012 – share of search clicks Facebook www.facebook.com 8.48% YouTube www.youtube.com 5.55% Yahoo! www.yahoo.com 2.63% Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org 2.01% Amazon.com www.amazon.com 1.40% Source: Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise Source: Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise Even through paid search, the landscape changes very little — the top 10 Websites captured 16 percent of all paid search clicks, and the top 500 captured 56 percent. Top five Websites to capture paid search clicks Websites Domain Q4 2012 – share of paid search clicks Amazon www.amazon.com 4.19% eBay www.ebay.com 3.46% eHow www.ehow.com 2.44% BestBuy www.bestbuy.com 1.06% Yahoo! Shopping shopping.yahoo.com .85% Source: Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise Source: Experian Marketing Services’ Hitwise Breaking through the clutter is key to reaching customers who are in the market for your product and services. Understanding who your ideal customers are can help to focus your search campaigns on these consumers and see greater campaign effectiveness. For more digital consumer insights, pre-order The 2013 Digital Marketer Report today.
With the New Year upon us, many Americans have turned to the Internet to help with their 2013 resolution of losing weight. According to Experian Marketing Services’ data, the most searched for diet was the “Paleo diet” for the week ending January 5, 2013. Searches for diets are one of the more predictable patterns on the Internet, with the high point always being the first of the year, and the low-point being around Thanksgiving week. Marketers can benefit from this trend by understanding and planning around the seasonality of this interest. Other top 10 searches that contained the term diet for last week included popular diets such as the Atkins diet, Gluten Free diet, and the 8-hour diet. Additional top 2013 diet searches included the Cabbage Soup diet, South Beach diet, Shred diet and the HCG diet. The Paleo diet, Gluten Free diet and Shred diet are all new to the top 10 list. Looking back at the same week in 2012 the Dash diet owned the #1 spot, and in 2011 the HCG diet was #1. The actual top overall search term this past week was Paula Deen diet, as she announced that she lost more than 30 pounds after revealing she had diabetes earlier in 2012. Interestingly enough, the term diabetic diet made the top 10 searches for the second straight year. Other trends we noticed include the continued popularity of low carb diets with the Paleo, Atkins, South Beach diets all taking top place in search term data. We’re also seeing the return of a religion based diet (the Jesus diet was popular in 2010) with the Daniel's diet among the top 20 searches in 2013. Many fad diets pop-up this time year usually with a time period attached – 2-day, 17-day or 3-day diets. So who is doing all the searching? Females accounted for 58% of diet searches this past week and households who earn between $30K-60K a year made up the majority of searches with 33%. The states with highest index of diet searches include: Delaware, North Dakota, Wyoming, Wisconsin and Nebraska. For more insights like this please follow us on twitter @ExperianMKT. Learn more about the author, Matt Tatham
The home stretch for the holidays is nearing as second wind for retailers is just starting as Experian Marketing Services analyzes the post-Christmas retail trend. Christmas Day 2012 saw a 27% increase in online traffic to the top 500 retail sites compared to 2011. The top retail sites received more than 115.5 million total U.S. visits. To date the holiday online traffic for the past 7 weeks to retail sites are up 10% for 2012 vs. 2011. Each retail holiday milestone day saw online traffic increases so far this season. Amazon remained the top visited site among retailers for this past week ending Dec. 22, 2012 and was also the top visited site on Christmas Day. Walmart, Target, BestBuy and Macy’s round out the top 5 most visited sites. The chart below includes the top 10 results: As tablets dominated our weekly top product search lists all holiday season it wasn’t surprising to see that the Apple iTunes site visits increased 193% and Apple.com visits increased 155% on Christmas Day 2012 vs. Christmas Eve 2012. The top product search terms sending traffic to the Apple.com site were iPod Nano, iPad Mini and iPad 4. Amazon.com visits increased 24% on Christmas Day 2012 vs. Christmas Eve 2012 as the top product search terms sending traffic to their site were Amazon Kindle, Kindle Fire and Kindle Also seeing growth were gift card searches as the year-over-year total search volume for "gift card" variations increased 6.1% this year compared to 2011. The big spike in searches happened last week (as online shoppers passed shipping deadlines). Below are the top 10 gift card searches for last week. We will continue to publish retail site data and insights through this holiday season. Please leave us a comment below if you have any specific questions along the way. UPDATE: The top 500 retail sites received more than 129 million total US visits on Dec. 26th, an increase of 1% compared to 2011 and 12% compared to Christmas Day 2012. Amazon was the top site followed by Walmart, Target, BestBuy and Macy’s. JCPenney, QVC and The Home Depot all moved into the top 10 on the day after Christmas. Learn more about the author, Matt Tatham