For many of today’s online media buyers, the go-to data is user data. While effective, user data is just one tactic to engage with your customer. There’s only so much information cookie data can provide and spending your advertising budget on that data alone is a mistake.
Using only audience data would be like selecting members of an Olympic basketball team solely based on specific bits of data like age, height, and weight. Even if you’re a junior league coach, you probably know that a lot more goes into the decision of putting together your team; player compatibility, agility, hand-eye coordination, and an interest in the sport itself. Age, height, and weight data need a frame of reference (context), and the same goes for cookie data. All audience data needs context, and that’s where page level, semantic targeting comes in.
The advantages of semantic data are monumental and game changing. Relying solely on cookie data is a dead-end for advertisers. The key differentiator among buyers and publishers will be how companies interpret audience data and semantic data together. Semantics and other page level data can provide valuable information on a page’s content, quality, and safety, allowing buyers to assess the relevancy of the page’s meaning in the context of the ad. The high cost and lack of scalability of cookies further adds to the appeal of semantic targeting.
Another thing to consider if you are targeting a particular cookie list or set of users is there’s a good chance that the data you have is the same exact data your competitors have. This means that you are competing for the same impressions and paying more for those users to see your message.
Semantic targeting provides a solution for these challenges. It gives you more bang for your buck than user data alone by ensuring that your ads are placed on relevant, high quality and safe pages for your audience as well as your brand. In terms of scalability, utilizing semantic targeting data would allow you to scale your campaigns beyond the limitations of user based targeting.
With the increasing amount of inventory and content available today, it is vital to be able to view that inventory in a standard language, or definition. Semantic and page level data targeting is key in gaining visibility and normalization across a growing inventory from multiple sources.
Buyers must look beyond user data and cookies to page level data for impressions that are relevant, providing you with the results you want at tremendous value.
