Improve ROAS by refining your target audience on any ad platform

When it comes to ad spend, everyone wants the best bang for their buck. In other words, they want the highest possible return on ad spend (ROAS). But with a limited marketing budget, and campaigns running in many other platforms and channels, most marketers are forced to compromise on their ad campaigns for the sake of time and money. They employ what’s commonly referred to as the “spray and pray” style of digital advertising. This refers to the process of targeting a large swath of customers with a general ad in an attempt to address the entire audience. This strategy might net a conversion or two, but ultimately, it results in a poor ad experience and wasted budget.

The “spray and pray” approach really only has a hope of working on brand new prospects, a.k.a. those with absolutely zero knowledge of your brand or solution. To engage prospects further down the funnel, you need to get a little more strategic. The easiest way to boost your conversion numbers is with more targeted audience segmentation. And the most seamless way to do that? It starts with the massive amounts of customer data your organization likely already has.

The reality today is that even companies that target specific audiences with their ads struggle because they are still too general in their segmentation. For instance, targeting all users who have attended a past webinar with an invitation to an upcoming webinar will be more effective than sending an ad out blindly to a large audience – but it far from guarantees a high conversion rate. If you were to target attendees of a past webinar on account-based marketing (ABM) with an ad promoting a new ABM ebook however, you would likely see a major boost in conversion rate and ROAS. Why? Because you’re addressing a specific audience with specific content geared towards their interests.

Unfortunately, extremely niche segmentation requires a high degree of marketing ops skill and is simply too much of a time commitment for most companies to justify employing it on every campaign they run. However, as more organizations shift their data storage and management to a cloud data warehouse, they also make way for a new and better way to segment, activate, and reach audiences.

Cloud Connect: The ultimate audience refinement tool

If you’re among these forward-thinking companies, then you have all the customer data you need to create highly targeted ad campaigns. The problem is that it’s locked away in your data warehouse. Now don’t get me wrong, a cloud data warehouse is a great and necessary tool for any modern business to have. It gives you a single source of truth for all of your customer data. But accessing specific data segments from the data warehouse and transferring it for use in your downstream platforms is traditionally a time-consuming, ineffective process for your developers.

That’s why we created Lytics Cloud Connect.

Cloud Connect is a reverse ETL solution that saves your developers time and makes your data actionable by streaming data from your data warehouse to any and all of your downstream ad platforms.

How does it help me save on ad spend?

Cloud Connect is an invaluable tool in helping you not only bridge your data warehouse with your downstream tools, but also in boosting your ROAS through highly specific targeting. There are three key elements to the product: Connections, Audiences, and Destinations.

Connections

The traditional way of actioning data from a data warehouse (DWH) for use in a downstream tool looks like this:

Marketing wants a specific segment of users to target via Facebook ads. So your data team has to build out, and then maintain, a connection from the DWH to your Facebook Ads platform just to transfer that one segment. Then marketing decides they also want to target that same segment via Google Ads. Now your data team has to build and maintain a completely new connector to your Google Ads platform. Do you see the problem? It’s an enormously inefficient process.

Cloud Connect gives you a one-size-fits-all connector from your DWH to all of your downstream tools. No one-off integrations, no wasted developer time. Just a simple means of accessing the data you need when and where you need it.

Audiences

With Cloud Connect, you can build a highly targeted audience right in your cloud data warehouse. All you need to do is write a simple SQL query against your DWH to create the specific segments that marketing requests. Not only do you benefit from the flexibility of SQL with support for queries that are both simple and complex, but now you can instantly generate granular target audiences for all of your marketing campaigns.

For example, let’s say you work at a clothing retailer and your marketing team wants to promote a sale on men’s athletic footwear. The old way of ad targeting would have you target a broad male demographic, maybe accounting for age range as well. Decent segmentation, but nowhere near specific enough to see any significant bump in ROAS.

With Cloud Connect, you can target an audience of anyone, (moms still buy shoes for a lot of 18-20 year olds), who purchased mens athletic shoes during a specific time frame. For our purposes, let’s say in the summer months of 2020. Now when summer 2022 rolls around, you can reach your audience with an incredibly targeted message like:

“I see it’s been a couple years since you upgraded your running shoes. Get the best new styles just in time for the summer workout grind.”

This level of specificity in your ad targeting and messaging shows customers that you know them as an individual buyer and are attempting to meet them where they are in their buying process. As a result, engagement and conversions will go up, resulting in a higher ROAS.

Destinations

This is exactly what it sounds like. With Cloud Connect, your data team can quickly and easily transfer your new audience segment to any of your downstream ad platforms (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Trade Desk, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.) for immediate use by your marketing team. This keeps your campaigns running without sacrificing ad quality. We’ve explained in a previous post how Lytics enables improved ad targeting in Facebook, but Cloud Connect takes the process a step further. Cloud Connect also has the added benefit of automating data syncs for audience refinement. Now your audience segments are being continually refreshed in your destination platforms, eliminating users who no longer meet the target criteria and conserving ad spend.

Cloud Connect enables easy audience segmentation in your data warehouse. Now you can get all of the customer segments you need into any of your downstream ad platforms without delaying your marketing campaigns or straining your data team.

Get started with Cloud Connect and test your first segments free today.

For more on Cloud Connect, check out our introductory blog.