by Mike Hamilton, Media Supervisor
As first-party data continues to become more critical to programmatic advertising, our partners are adopting new technologies to enhance relevance, engagement, and conversion. With The Trade Desk’s imminent rollout of its new AI enabled UX, Kokai, we will be able to provide our clients with innovative first-party data solutions that go beyond direct activation, informing targeting, inventory, and bidding strategies.
A foundational element of Kokai is infusing campaigns with first-party data in the form of a ‘seed audience.’ A seed represents your converted customers and will serve as a north star to guide decision-making and quantify the relevance of your reach. A seed leverages what we know about your best customers and uses that to help identify high-value users, inventory sources, and geos within our campaigns. Using seeds doesn’t change the type of audience that we target, but it does inform our targeting strategy—helping us pick the very best segments and strategies to help achieve your goals.
What should I use as my seed?
Since a seed is a concentrated representation of your most valuable customers, the strongest signals for a seed audience are purchasers or conversions. Whether it’s past purchasers, current clients, web page visitors, loyalty program members, or even prospective customer personas, by defining our seeds, we are telling the platform who the most important audience is, giving it the context it needs to identify the biggest opportunities for value.
What happens when I upload my conversion or customer data as a seed?
By uploading a seed audience, we can surface relevance and value insights to inform campaign setup and optimizations, along with post-campaign metrics like Quality Reach Index.
- Relevance insights will be surfaced to help understand if our strategies are set up to reach people who are similar to our seed. This is a forecasted metric to help inform campaign strategy and better predict outcomes.
- Value is a new metric that is available when building out third-party audiences. Once we upload a seed into the platform, we can surface the most valuable audience segments based on common attributes among your known converters.
- Quality Reach Index is an actualized metric that helps identify the most effective targeting strategies. Every tactic will be scored on a scale of 1–100, helping understand how actualized delivery aligns with people like our seed. This will be beneficial for both optimizing strategies and increasing relevance.
Summary: Leveraging a combination of online and offline first-party data will become a critical strategy to optimize campaigns and stay ahead of the curve. Utilizing inputs like CRM lists to ground seed audiences and allowing campaign-specific conversion data to iterate and refresh the model will lead to the strongest source of truth to inform campaign decision-making.
The VJ team is here to answer any questions you may have and help make the right segmentation decisions to inform our seed audiences, making our campaigns stronger than ever.
