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If you conduct business online, you have an asset that is just as valuable as cash piling up with every new day your properties are on the web.
User and site data has become a form of currency that self generates as more people interact with your brand online. You don’t have to guess who your clients are. You don’t have to wonder if you’re spending money in the wrong places. It’s all right there! That’s as valuable as the numbers in your bank account because it can lead to more. All it needs is the right strategy to transform from a mealy grub into something beautiful.
If you're thinking to yourself, "yeah, but we've known this for a long time, guy." You're right. We have. But it's time for marketers and site owners to begin seeing data as the raw resource it is in the iteration of the web we're experiencing now and the one we will experience when Web3 takes shape around us.
If you've been in the digital marketing world for a while, you probably remember the Big Data craze during the new century's teenage years. In typical marketing fashion, marketers became Keanu learning Big Data Kung Fu overnight. Unlike Neo, we all lost to AI. Machine learning took over and began to sort out the data for us.
The problem with your data is that the primary beneficiary of its yield is not you. It’s the biggest companies in the world today. They own the machines and the AI technology that compile your data into segments by which the world can target users on the web with advertising. And they've done pretty well so far.
Google's ad revenue amounts to about $1,000 per adult in the US every year.
That’s a pretty staggering figure.
How do they do it?
Everything we do touches their assets. Can’t find that massage parlor? Use Google Maps and provide data that you have a car, you’re stressed and you have discretionary income. All of that data is tracked a cataloged into a user persona. This is the 'creepy' part of advertising with data.
Google has tens of millions of data points used to serve ads. Many of them come from Google Analytics which is present on about 95% of websites. That’s your data! And Google is making some big fat coin using it.
Sounds pretty rough right?
It doesn’t have to be.
If they can turn data into profit, so we can we.
That's not to say we can stop the machine owners from making money off our data, but at least we join them in using it to benefit our own efforts. A great example of this is Google's newest all-encompassing advertising campaign known as Performance Max or P-Max for the 'heads. This campaign is nearly completely built on machine learning from both your data and the yottabytes of data Google owns. For the first time ever, Google is allowing advertisers to target ads by audiences rather than keywords, pixels, and affinity categories.
If that sounds exactly like what Facebook got absolutely rinsed for in Congress a few years ago, that's because it is. Google essentially pulled one of these and waited in the bushes until it was safe to come out.
Who knows what will happen next. P-Max could get shuttered or everyone else could catch up. Eventually, machine learning will be too enticing and too profitable to ignore. More advanced data usage will show up and provide ways for site owners to capitalize on their users' actions.
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When paired with thoughtful and engaging creative, site data can provide us the information we need to make sure your advertising hits the audience you want and need to speak to with pinpoint accuracy. It can lead to faster, more valuable conversions. It can increase your returns and multiply your investment.
Data is a caterpillar that we can put into a cocoon and watch it transform into a beautiful moneyfly.
All it needs is the right strategy.
