Lotame partners with Survata to validate third-party data with users’ survey answers
The pilot project targets Survata’s online surveys to cookied users in Lotame DMP segments, grading the quality of data providers with actual responses.
Data management platforms (DMP) often offer third-party data that you can match against the cookies or mobile device IDs of users you’re targeting. This outside data helps you add more attributes for that user, for better ad or content targeting.
The problem, though, is whether the outside data is any good.
DMP Lotame has now announced an exclusive partnership with market research firm Survata to rate that data with user surveys of those segments. The companies say this pilot of Segment Validation is, to their knowledge, the first of its kind.
Let’s say you are an automaker, and you want better info to target visitors to your site.
Every visitor who goes to the site’s section about family vans can be tagged with a cookie or by their mobile device IDs, and Lotame can then help that automaker direct ads about family vans to those users when they visit other sites.
But do they have small kids, or are they just checking things out? Have they bought a car from this automaker before? What is their income range?
Normally, the automaker might layer on other data from other providers — outside Lotame — to answer those questions. One provider might be able to match the user’s cookie or mobile device ID with, say, info about the income ranges in neighborhoods where that user lives.
But is it accurate?
‘The future of market research’
In this Lotame/Survata pilot, a segment of users is created for that brand through cookies or mobile device IDs. Then, some of those users — such as those who visit the family van section of the site — see an overlay window from Survata when they visit the web page on family vans, asking them to take a brief, anonymous online survey in exchange for premium content like a video. This assumes that Lotame-tagged users visit a site in Survata’s publisher network.
Those survey questions could include, of course, a question about your income range, or whether you have children below the age of 12.
Lotame then matches those survey answers for anonymous individuals against what data providers have supplied for those same users. One data provider might be 90 percent accurate about income range, while another might only be 30 percent accurate. The brand can then decide which data provider to use for what kind of info, or how much weight to give certain data from each outside provider.
One key factor in this test is that both Lotame and Survata use cookies or mobile device IDs to pinpoint an individual user anonymously, matching the user’s own survey answers against his or her site behavior and third-party data.
While some brands may use conventional market research to eventually verify assumptions about user segments, this Lotame-Survata data matching is conducted in real time. And Survata can serve surveys to specific users, just as Lotame can help deliver ads to those individuals.
“Appending behavioral and attitudinal data [from websites and third-party data providers], in real time to self-reported data for instant insights into consumers’ engagements with a brand is the future of market research,” according to ad agency Marcus Thomas partner Jennifer Hirt-Marchand, in a statement accompanying the announcement.
Lotame Senior Director of Market Innovation Laura Lewellyn told me that Lotame is now offering this “ratings currency” of data providers to a few selected brand customers and hopes to make it generally available “soon.”
Last year, Survata launched a sort of pretest for this approach, when it began targeting second- and third-party data segments of users for its surveys. Those same segments could also be targeted with ads, prescreening ad targeting with survey data.
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