Authenticated & Unauthenticated Audience Management
Our mission at Advanced Contextual is simple. We believe individual privacy is important and doesn’t have to compromise good business. We provide publishers and brands with tools to better understand their audiences through content consumption and dynamic intent data. We do this in a way that preserves both scale and precision, not tied to any single identifier.
We built Advanced Contextual with the help of great customers and partners. Building something which is being actively used by customers is a much easier way to develop a tight product/market fit if you’ve got the right customers and partners, and we did.
All of our customers have two types of people they service: authenticated and unauthenticated. Publishers have part of their user base which subscribes, so they know who that person is. Then they have other users who aren’t subscribers. Brands have customers they have authenticated via product purchases. Then they have audiences who have not converted. In each instance the first group is authenticated and the second is unauthenticated.
Publishers and brands need to know more about both groups. Having an understanding of someone’s current interests allows companies to tailor their customer experience in service of both acquisition and retention. They need to know it in a precise way at scale and it has to be delivered into BI and other systems that include programmatic advertising pipes, but they’re not the only consideration any longer in our new world.
Fortunately the tools exist today to accomplish the objective of maximum knowledge about authenticated and unauthenticated audiences. We’ve deployed these tools which we think define advanced contextual, and they help to address the following questions:
What are your segments? You know the top level split of authenticated and unauthenticated audiences, but they’re not monolithic groups. You should be able to leverage any audience or customer taxonomy you have at a more nuanced level.
What is your analytic kernel? Defining the persistent signal you want to track is the next question, and you should have options. Keywords, topics, entities (e.g. location, people and organizations) and mindsets are the basics.
With these two fundamental questions addressed, you have your audience segmented in a way that reflects your business and you’re listening to triggers that make sense to those segments. Then it’s time to operationalize it, which brings up two additional questions:
What is your KPI? Any data you use should support the attainability of specific KPIs, either acquisition or retention regardless if it’s a publisher or brand.
What is your workflow? Any strategy without an execution plan is just an idea, so know how you’re going to leverage the improved view of the customer or audience.
Here’s an example.
A publisher wants to increase the time spent with its content each month and gain new audience. It has segmented its audience into authenticated and unauthenticated audiences and from there has created consumption quintiles which represent frequency and total time spent with content monthly.
With that done the publisher begins to create content to encourage more visits and more time spent. They’ve deployed contextual analysis within each of their audience segments so they know what to write. They then can look at their segments at the topic level, providing them a level of granularity that’s critical in the post-cookie world.
As brands and publishers strive to understand more about their customers and prospects, content consumption can be a strong signal in the context of a measurable plan and a robust feedback loop. That’s what we’ve learned in building Advanced Contextual. Contact us below to learn more.