Third Party Data: Its Uses In Search & More

Today, I wrap up my series on Marketing Land about the different types of data marketers can utilize within their campaigns. The focus this time around is on third-party data.

Third-party data is pretty amazing, but it’s reasonably rare in search, because of the engines’ strict data and privacy policies. Luckily for you, several data management platforms (DMPs) and search management platforms have ways to let you make this work.

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs) are a great tool in your armory. Thanks to the wizardry of AdWords’ smart pixel, you can use a single tag but put the user into a different list based on a javascript variable on the page called Custom Parameters. Using this technology, when your DMP (or management platform) detects that a user on your site fits one of your pre-defined segments, it will fire the pixel with that variable set, and AdWords can then sort that user into an RLSA list.

It’s fantastic, and gives you huge amounts of extra control when you’re trying to buy against third-party data in PPC.

More interesting than simply combining third-party data into your remarketing is the insight you can learn to improve your search prospecting. As you buy third-party data in your DMP and start to build better segments and get a better understanding of your users, one of the things you can learn is how each of those segments searches. As people visit your site and start fitting into your segments, anybody who came from paid search will have a keyword associated with their visit.

By using third-party data to build better quality segments, you gain more insight about how each segment searches, allowing you to start refining your keyword lists based on not just conversion, but also anything else you might want to measure (e.g., demographic, in-market status, or interest categories).

To learn more about what sort of segments you’ll want and how to go about creating them, check out the full column over at Marketing Land.