With Australians overwhelmingly feeling the pinch of inflation and interest rate hikes, it’s no surprise that people are changing their shopping habits.

Circana research reveals about 45 percent of consumers are sacrificing their favourite brands to save money, and almost three-quarters are comparing prices before making a purchase. It’s a whole new world out there, driven by the need to make every single dollar count. 

Beyond shopper loyalty, supply chain and pricing challenges, advertisers and their agencies are also dealing with an increasingly fragmented media landscape and, in turn, how to reach the right audience while under pressure to devise the right media spend.

And they are responding by shifting compressed media budgets from traditional to digital channels. At the same time, after years of prepping for their deprecation, cookies are now not crumbling.

After Google’s recent announcement that it won’t be rolling out the mass removal of third-party cookies and consumers would be able to opt themselves out of third-party tracking, the question on advertisers’ lips is: what is the sweet spot for reaching consumers?

The sweet spot

The sweet spot to deliver effective targeted advertising lies in purchase-based targeting.

This is the perfect ingredient to meet individual consumer preferences en masse given reduced data access and limited segmentation ability. It’s all about accessing high-quality, unfiltered data derived from sources based on real people and not bots. 

Just as consumers have access to the best ingredients and recipes at the click of a finger, you can also hone in on zero, first, second and third-party data. But to amplify budgets and pinpoint audiences with reliable insights that go well beyond traditional media targeting, add an additional layer of purchase-based data to optimise campaigns and ensure the greatest return on investment.

These sales-based digital audiences are potential customers who’ve already shown interest in your product or service through previous purchases of a brand or product, or from a modelled propensity to purchase – a statistical technique predicting the likelihood of an individual to engage in a specific behaviour.

In fact, purchase-based data is one of the most effective ways to optimise campaigns as it provides confidence when targeting as you know that the audience has a propensity to buy. When layered over the traditional way of buying advertising via demographics, and contextual and geographic factors, these insights allow for exceptional detail and precision not previously readily available.

High-propensity audiences

Identifying high-propensity audiences delivers three key measures of success in digital channels.

Purchase-based data delivers greater success in media buying and access to real-time data that has integrity and is gathered from a range of accurate sources. Advertisers who adopt this will stand out with:

1. Higher conversion rates

High-propensity audiences are the people most likely to purchase a promoted product or service and convert into paying customers. By targeting this audience with tailored marketing messages, you can scale your reach to increase the likelihood of conversion and achieve a higher ROI through targeted campaigns and look-a-like audiences more likely to result in conversions.

2. Increased audience engagement

High-propensity audiences are also more likely to engage with marketing messages than general audiences as they likely already have some level of familiarity with your category or segment and as such, are more likely to be interested.

3. Improved customer retention, reach and frequency

Targeting high-propensity audiences with relevant and engaging content can improve customer retention because shoppers are more likely to feel valued by the brand and continue to make purchases from it over time.

By analysing their purchase behaviour and preferences rather than clicks or views, you can gain a deeper understanding of your target market to refine marketing strategies and achieve more impactful reach and frequency measures.

Four times the ROI

Deliver up to four times ROI than any other audience type with purchase-based shopper targeting. 

Media audience activation is critical. The most accurate audiences best predict where your customers will engage. For example, Circana recently worked with a frozen food manufacturer that had identified that their current targeting strategy was delivering a sub-optimal performance in its key metrics for reach, frequency and sales with digital publishers.

We identified optimal Circana audiences for the manufacturer’s brands that would revive their performance. This tactic, coupled with aligning content to the publishers where these audiences spent the most time by brand, enabled the manufacturer to increase ad effectiveness by more than 23 percent and ROAS by 20 percent.

Purchase-based targeting such as Circana Audiences delivers the sweet spot for success to deliver media precision at scale and promote products or services through digital channels by leveraging audiences created from consented consumer purchase data.

This will help increase conversions, improve engagement and gain valuable customer insights. And what could taste better than that?

Circana Audiences leverages the largest shopper panel in Australia which comprehensively represents the evolving household population – demographically, geographically, nationally, socially, economically, ethnically and culturally. Creative and media agencies can segment campaigns with an additional layer of data with Circana Audiences capturing purchases in real-time and covering core, non-core and ‘impulse’ FMCG categories within the grocery and non-grocery channels. 

Barry Collins is the commercial director at Circana – a leading provider of retail analytics and insights. He grows the company’s footprint across media targeting and measurement, advanced analytics and insights in the Asia Pacific region.

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