Advertisers and their agency partners are well-versed in assembling audiences based on who they want to reach. Yet effective audience composition isn’t simply about deciding who is ideal; it’s also about determining who should be excluded.
Audience suppression is a superpower that many advertisers don’t realize they have. When used effectively, it can be the difference between a good campaign and a fantastic one. It may also be the missing link between annoying a consumer and building a lasting relationship.
There are three main reasons to get serious about suppression: compliance, partnerships and performance. While compliance is table stakes, partnership and performance-driven suppression strategies can truly drive results.
Navigating compliance with confidence
For many advertisers, legal compliance is the primary reason to include suppressions. The current regulatory climate is made up of a patchwork of state-level laws. These cover concerns around consumer privacy at large, as well as rules for certain verticals like alcohol, gaming or health care.
Most platforms allow advertisers to apply suppression levers to their gambling or adult-only campaigns through geographic state-level or demographic age-based targeting selections. Meanwhile, privacy laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) mandate control of how personal health information is used in advertising.
Focusing on high-value audiences
When advertisers identify specific audiences, their goal is to target the qualified individuals most likely to respond and take action.
Advertisers should also consider applying this logic in reverse, investing in identifying who is least likely to take a desired action and ensuring they are suppressed across campaigns and channels. These can be deterministic suppression files pulled from your customer data: who purchased recently, who recently visited a store, etc.
Brands can also create an even larger audience through custom modeling, using scoring that weeds out individuals who don’t display desired behavioral or purchase patterns.
Once an audience is activated for a campaign within a buying platform, suppression can happen in a variety of ways.
Advertisers can apply suppression to avoid showing ads to consumers who have already purchased or taken a desired action. Also, ad impressions can either be excluded or reduced to churned prospects and lower-value customer groups that have stopped or have minimal engagement with your campaign. All of these collective suppression tactics can generate higher-performing and more efficient advertising campaigns by eliminating waste and concentrating on the most optimal audiences.
Stronger partnerships, smarter audience strategies
This is perhaps the least obvious reason for suppression, but it’s a great use case. Today, marketing relies heavily on partnerships between brands, often in disparate verticals. By working together, brands can reach new customers who are already familiar with the partner brand.
Credit card companies regularly work with airlines or hotel chains on shared campaigns. Entertainment companies partner with internet providers. Media companies build promotions with food delivery companies. All of these represent instances where one brand may need to suppress audience members for various reasons.
If a retailer and a publisher have a partnership promotion, both are focusing efforts on reaching net new customers. The publisher should suppress their current content subscribers from the retailer’s audience to maximize ad spend, prevent customer confusion and maintain loyalty.
Turning data into action
A crucial aspect of accurate suppression for any purpose is maintaining good data hygiene. With clean, accessible data, marketers can identify brand engagement, purchase history, lead scoring and other targeting factors.
Accurately connecting the dots from your CRM to a media buy can make all the difference in delivering desired KPIs, especially with net new customers. This is especially true in certain verticals with short or long buy cycles, like automotive, ecommerce and financial services. Brands in these verticals often struggle to suppress existing customers, pushing expensive direct mail packages or TV ads for products that consumers have already purchased.
Advertisers have a lot of evidence to take suppression seriously. Just like most things in marketing, suppression takes practice. When brands are more thoughtful about how to use the data at their fingertips, they can build more powerful audience strategies that ensure compliance, high performance and positive customer experiences.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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