How Marketers Use Big Data To Rapidly Scale Campaigns

For the past few years, “big data” has developed a lot of buzz in the industry. What is big data really and how do marketers use it to their advantage? According to Wikipedia, big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. As marketers become more exposed to analytics tools that process big data, insights can be drawn to help make smarter marketing decisions. This post will discuss one of the many ways in which marketers leverage big data to rapidly scale campaigns and generate over 3x the amount of traffic at a lower cost.

Say you’re running a campaign with relevant targeting that’s generating profitable returns. As time goes on, you notice conversion rates start to dip and costs slowly rise, while traffic remains still. This will eventually happen to any campaign as it saturates the market. So, how do you quickly scale the campaign back up to profitability and stop the damage this campaign is causing? The strategy I’m covering is the process of scaling campaigns to lateral audiences. Just as a search marketer would pull out her thesaurus to scale on semantically related keywords, scaling laterally across audiences expands a target audience to include those who possess the same fundamental needs, desires, and problems. If your product solves a problem for a particular group of people, expanding your audiences laterally helps you find different people who also have a need for your product.

Unfortunately, a thesaurus will not find synonymous problems that your product solves. To execute this strategy, marketers must manually research the market or purchase an expensive report to avoid the overwhelming data mining process. This is where big data comes in: an efficient and cost-saving way to execute this strategy is to use a big data analytics solution, like MixRank. MixRank is an intelligent search engine for ads & their traffic sources, indexing millions of contextual and banner ads across the web. The keyword search feature allows users to find semantically related ads, providing a rapid and easy-to-use solution to scaling audiences and reaching an entirely new market.

Here’s a simple use-case: say you’re targeting the keyword “last minute hotel deal” for your ad campaign. Type that keyword into the search bar to view semantically related ads.

The search results will populate ads. The example on the first-page results shows an audience you could be targeting if you were selling travel deals (the “Business Travel” audience):

If you’re wondering why a “Business Travel” ad shows up in the search results for the “last minute hotel deal” keyword, this is actually an essential feature with MixRank’s search engine. All of the search results are contextually related on a broad match-type, so the ads will rarely ever have an exact match to the keyword you enter, but rather, these ads will provide you insights on semantically related ads and keywords that can help you save valuable time, uncover new audiences, and scale faster.

Additionally, marketers also have the opportunity to cut their costs by over 50%. Below are the suggested maximum CPCs for the keywords in question (data pulled from Google’s Traffic Estimator):

Last Minute Hotel Deal: Suggested Maximum CPC of $2.92
Business Travel: Suggested Maximum CPC of $1.42

This gives marketers the power to pause current campaigns on the decline, and scale it to two or more new campaigns for the same cost. Not only will you reach new audiences, you’re optimizing your ad budget to drive more traffic at a lower cost.

MixRank’s search engine for traffic sources and ads is free to register and gives you access to unlimited search queries, advertiser reports, and publisher reports. What is there to lose? Register here to create your free MixRank account today.

About MixRank
MixRank.com is a spy tool for contextual and display ads. With MixRank you can see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic and which ad copy is performing best for them across over 100,000 sites. You can use MixRank to watch your competitors spend money testing different ads and traffic sources, see which ones worked best, and use that data to build your own campaign.

Author

Becky is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at TUNE. Before TUNE, she handled content strategy and marketing communications at several tech startups in the Bay Area. Becky received her bachelor's degree in English from Wake Forest University. After a decade in San Francisco and Seattle, she has returned home to Charleston, SC, where you can find her strolling through Hampton Park with her pup and enjoying the simple things between adventures with friends and family.