Determining your ROI on first-party data
A clear-headed justification of adopting expensive new technologies.
ROI > Everything Else
There’s been a lot of chatter around “first-party data” and how valuable it is to media organizations. And it’s all true.
But we’ve also been hearing an excellent and persistent question from those same people — “how”.
Sure, first-party data is valuable, but how? How exactly can it be utilized for revenue?
Gaining fancy insights or hyper-segmenting your audience is great, but how does it translate to more revenue?
Getting a return on your investment is more important than anything else when it comes to weighing new technologies and next steps.
Define your use cases
Fill in the blank.
If I knew _______ about my audience, I could make more revenue.
Some examples for the creative juices:
If you knew why customers abandoned your checkout flow…
You could plug the leaks and convert more people.
If you knew which portions of your website certain audiences cared about more…
You could sell those specific segments to interested advertisers.
Think things like “real estate” or “investing” or “restaurants”. Broaden your scope to not just ads on pages, but targeted ads within individual stories.
If you knew which content on the web your audience cared about…
You could send sales emails targeting them specifically.
If you knew where else your audience spent time on the web…
You could help your advertisers target them there, too.
What’s the ROI of those use cases?
It might be cool to know where your audience spends time online, but how much is that data actually worth?
Ask your advertisers.
Imagine a scenario where you can sell an ad to everyone in your audience interested in real estate. That’s something an advertiser would absolutely be interested in.
Then what if you could double or even triple the reach of that ad?
What if you could target look-alike audiences across other platforms?
What is that ad package worth now?
There’s your revenue-producing use case.
From there to here
We’re strong believers in CDPs (Customer Data Platforms). In short - they help tie your audience data together into a unified view.
But without a clear path to revenue, it’s just a really expensive toy.
With a specific and clear path to revenue in mind, you can determine the right tool for the job.
This is the right order of thinking - from there to here. Start with the end in mind, and work back from there.
Now, even though the technology is expensive, you can make a clear-headed decision. Is it worth it?
We think so.
Want to make it concrete?
Send an email to johnny@datajoe.com to set up a call!
We are partnered with Greg Khrehbiel, and would love to offer a free Data Revenue Audit.
In short, this is a call where we walk through your data, opportunities for revenue, and some of the low-hanging fruit available to you.