The data dilemma

By AdNews | Sponsored

Australian advertisers are facing increasing challenges with the way they use data in their campaigns. While privacy is a concern for many, there is something more pressing on the minds of local advertisers as we step into 2021...

Advertisers have had mammoth amounts of data placed at their fingertips over recent years. Never before have they been able to reach audiences at such a granular level.

Yet many advertisers still don’t feel completely confident wading through what is often insurmountable masses of data to maximise effectiveness in their campaigns. In fact, data accuracy is one of their key concerns.

According to Xandr’s Third Annual Relevance Report, while expertise in data varies across regions, most advertisers recognize the challenge in creating better ad experiences for consumers. Advertisers in Australia are the least confident, compared to their global counterparts, in their ability to use data to create more relevant campaigns. 

Only one in three Australian advertisers consider themselves experts in creating better ad experiences. This is largely driven by the fact that advertisers in Australia are most concerned about data accuracy with 60% saying ensuring the data is accurate is the leading challenge to using data today. 

In fact, data accuracy is the number one concern around working with data for three in five advertisers with identifying audiences across screens and no uniform cross-channel standard of measurement following behind shortly.

Driving Relevance
Personalised advertising is somewhat of a fine craft. Mastering relevant and personalised campaigns require advertisers to be pulling together the right data points to share the right messages to the right person at the right time.

Local advertisers recognise that this isn’t an easy feat with 53% ranking creating a better ad experience as their top challenge - the most of any international market.

The ability to improve advertising is closely associated with being able to reach audiences effectively and compliantly. Fragmentation and change in consumer media habits, as well as consumer privacy concerns also ranked as top challenges for advertisers at 44% and 42% respectively.

While they consider integration of first-party data as the best approach for reaching the right audience, only one in ten advertisers in Australia consider their data to be very effective for delivering more relevant video advertising, driven again by concerns around accuracy.

Future-Proofing
As the deprecation of third-party cookies becomes imminent, many have begun to discover the benefits of contextual data, which enables advertisers to reach relevant and engaged audiences based on the context of a page rather than through personal identifiers.

Investments are also being made with half of Australian advertisers already investing in data partnerships and alternative identity solutions, which will only become more important as data privacy regulations continue to evolve.

With 2021 on the horizon, advertisers are continuing to future-proof themselves for this new, data-driven world of advertising.

Check out Xandr's Third Annual Relevance Report here.

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