New AudienceReport feature: Validate your campaigns against any target group imaginable

When running digital campaigns, you often have a very specific target group in mind. But how do you know if you are actually reaching your desired target group – e.g. people interested in buying a car?

Two years ago, we launched the first edition of our Custom Segments feature in AudienceReport, allowing you to upload your own custom segments for more detailed profiling of your campaigns. However, with this new feature, Custom Segments has become a much more powerful and valuable feature.

Custom Segments as a part of the target group definition

Unlike previously, Custom Segments is now a part of the target group definition when creating your campaigns. So, besides defining your target group on demographics like gender, age, income etc., you are now also able to define your target group as e.g. custom segments with a purchase intent towards cars or travels.

By default, you can choose between a wide range of purchase intent and ownership segments when defining your target group. These are the same purchase intent and ownership segments that are available for targeting through AudienceData. Besides this, you are able to have your own self-defined custom segments uploaded for validation.

Custom Segments as an integrated part of the report

With the prior version of Custom Segments, all you got was a simple profile report showing you the percentage distribution between e.g. car owners and non-car owners. You still get that, but with the new version where you are allowed to add custom segments to your target group, Custom Segments become a much more integrated part of your report.

Now, all campaign numbers will be affected when custom segments are added to your campaign. Among other things, this means that you will now get insights into how many people in the custom segment that you have reached, how the reach buildup has been and how the affinity for the custom segment is across your media placements.

Validation related to advertisers’ business goals

With Custom Segments, you can finally show advertisers that you’re able to reach X amount of the people, who are relevant to their brand or product. This by getting to know if the ones exposed to your campaigns are actually in the market for the products being advertised or if the ones exposed to your campaigns have a specific interest in the products. This enables you to show the real effect of your targeting data.

Add up to 5 custom segments per campaign

As custom segments are now tied to the campaign, the target group will narrow as custom segments are added to the campaign, which eventually will affect the sample size. So, to make sure that the sample size doesn’t get too small when custom segments are added to the campaign, a limit of 5 custom segments has been set as the maximum amount of custom segments possible to add.

From Reach to Coverage

One thing that is especially important to notice when adding custom segments to your campaigns is that reach will be reported as coverage. The reason for this is that the content of the custom segments is based on unverified 3rd party data, whereas regular demographic segments can be verified by cross-referencing data from national statistical banks. For instance, we know from Statistics Denmark that the 18-24-year-olds in Denmark represent around 9% of the online population, while the proportion of the online population that is in the market for buying a new car is an estimate based solely on survey answers.

To be clear about when the validation of your campaigns is based on numbers from statistical banks and when it is based on unverified 3rd party data, we distinguish between reach and coverage.

In our FAQ, you can learn more about other aspects related to the new Custom Segments feature.

Get started

Reach out to us at hello@audienceproject.com or via your usual contact at AudienceProject and learn how to start validating your campaigns against custom segments.