Big Data Meets Ad Tech – It’s a Perfect Combination

Big Data is the new oil. It has fundamentally transformed numerous industries. Advertising technology aka Ad:tech, one of the fastest growing industries in the world, is a prominent recipient of the benefits of Big Data. Advertising is no more about a set of people brainstorming about the next cool idea – Advertising Technology has grown phenomenally over the past few years and has surpassed the traditional advertising.

According to a Forrester Research Report, the US Online Display Ad spending will reach $37.6 billion in 2019!

Big data is facilitating advanced analytics, which is helping marketers become selective about the paid online marketing method. Today, even before a single penny is spent on, say, Google AdWords, Twitter, Facebook or YouTube ads or Banner ads, brands want to know whether their efforts will be fruitful or not and what will be the ROI for them. They want to precisely know how all the parts of the marketing campaign are affecting the sales and what is the impact of budget reallocations on the revenue.

Ad Tech companies are gathering copious amounts of real time data and analysing it to gather some meaningful insights about the consumer behaviour online. This data is helping them make profitable and intelligent business decisions. The integration of big data and new analytical methods is providing new insights to marketers and helping them understand the real impact on revenue.

The effect of big data on advertising technology

Advertisers are willing to spend extra money to show their advertisements to the precise target audience who is likely to benefit from their ad. Big data is presenting this opportunity to the advertisers.

Right ads at the right time

Advertisers are always looking for ways to accurately target, creatively capture, and quickly convert the prospects and increase the marketing ROI. Using big data analytics, advertisers are using highly analytic and algorithm-based ads to target the right audience – at the right moment.

Technology is redefining the way brands now engage with their current and prospects.  New avenues are opening up for brands to help them interface with their target audience in real time through creative ways.

By using the latest technologies, ad tech companies are finding out new ways of creating hyper-targeted ads.  Using big data analytics, ad tech companies can capture and analyse the audience behaviour – which ads they are interacting with the most, what type of content is turning them away, what are the kind of interactions they have with the content, and so on. By analysing the actions, lifestyle, motivation, behaviour and other factors of the prospective customers, big data can help the brands in optimizing the creative and campaign decisions and crafting tailored ads for a specific set of customers. It is helping them create a personalized experience for each customer.

Right ads at the right place

Instead of going by the gut feeling and placing the ads on your website where they ‘look’ good, now companies have started using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms to study the historical website data and place the relevant ads for targeted user groups. Using heat maps, these technologies study the website visitor behavior and based on that, place the relevant ads on those positions to focus on the user.

Predictive lead scoring

Predictive Lead Scoring helps organizations increase the quality of lead and predict the future behavior of the lead more accurately. It relies heavily on analysis of past and current data – the data is gathered from systems such as CRM, marketing automation tools, email campaign tools etc. Predictive Lead Scoring involves consolidation, cleansing and analysis of internal data from various internal systems, monitoring of the online behaviour of millions of other companies, prospects and decision-makers, and a semantic analysis of their digital footprint through Data Science and machine learning. It can then help in predicting the buying behavior by providing a 360-degree profile view of the prospects.

The Challenges

The Ad Tech industry has two unique characteristics – firstly, it is heavily driven by human behaviour data and secondly, any improvement in analytics of that data has a direct impact on the revenue of the Ad Tech companies because it impacts the performance of marketing campaigns. As with every industry, since the Ad Tech industry is going through a transformation, it is seeing quite a few challenges such as concerns around privacy and transparency, ownership of big data initiatives, and bots and frauds.

While the challenges in use of big data in ad tech are significant, the opportunities are extremely exciting. With the tsunami of data and information which can be leveraged to get useful insights, organisations today are pursuing ways to not only gather and store the data from various sources but to also have a solid technology infrastructure which will allow them to perform analytics on it. Building the infrastructure is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. However, organisations are tapping into the cloud as a valid alternative for this.

Ad tech can tremendously benefit from the real brand intelligence and brand analytics and it is high time that organizations bring in the “data-driven” thinking in their teams.