Ad Automation, Personalized Marketing and The Privacy Paradox

Can Advertising Automation Strike a Balance Between Personalization and User Privacy?

By 2023, 70% of the world’s population will have their personal data covered under modern privacy regulations. The dilemma is clear and valid – people are worried that their every move as a (potential) customer is being tracked online, but at the same time, they want personalized marketing experiences. They want to be recognized by the masses and have a convenient, no-hassle purchase experience.

Personalized marketing is not just about going with the trend. Today, if you are not personalizing your advertising then it is very likely you are losing out to your competitors. There are a variety of ad tech platforms in the market that use smart data feeds powered by insight to produce offers and content tailored for different customers.

And this is where digital marketers should be thinking beyond ethical and regulatory limitations of privacy, particularly since majority of customers are reluctant to share personal information that they consider sensitive from age, geography, gender, relationship status to sexual orientation.

The Offense and Defense of Personalized Marketing

Every brand is competing to win, and trying really hard to personalize their services for a diverse range of customers.

• The offense: Marketers often forget how this strategy might affect their customers where data and privacy are potentially being compromised.
• The defense: Customers are taking careful precautions to keep their data safe such as private browsing, ad-blockers, privacy filters and more. It’s not surprising at this point that some internet users go to great lengths to create different aliases to keep their real identities safe.

Remember the chain of privacy concerns that users raised against Facebook? Starting from 2006, when Facebook introduced the news feed feature which showed the activities of their connections to the 2019 500 million user data leak, the social media giant had to address various privacy concerns raised by their users. Facebook did the same thing as many other brands, but the real issue at stake was unethical data collection, without consumers’ consent.

So how can digital marketers find a happy medium between user privacy and personalization?

Although there is still the risk of data privacy being compromised, data usage has become more transparent. Users now know and can control how their data is used by social media apps and can choose what ads they want to see (to an extent). Among the benefits from transparent and ethical data collection:

• Customers have control over how their data is being used
• Customers have the choice to opt-in for personalized ads catered to their preferences which improves user experience
• Brands are able to engage with their customers on a personalized level to enhance brand awareness and loyalty

The Art of Balancing User Privacy and Personalized Ads

According to a research conducted in 2020, almost 58% of customers are ready to share their data in exchange for better services. The question is how do you reach each customer and offer them a specially-curated service?

Personalized marketing cannot exist without customer data. While there are many ways to access huge chunks of data quickly, sometimes it results in an information overload. Ad automation is widely used by digital marketers: customers receiving welcome email with special offers and discounts for their first purchase, win-back programs, abandoned shopping cart emails and more.

However, there’s growing concern about how generic it can get, let’s use the following scenarios:

• Say an online user has booked flight tickets to Seychelles for a vacation. They then open their Facebook app, Gmail or other apps from the Play Store and see ads related to resorts and hotels in Seychelles.
• Now imagine getting a chain of promotional emails regarding every other location similar to Seychelles. As a consumer, will you be pleased or annoyed at this show of ‘personalized marketing’?

This is pretty much how ad automation plays its part in personalized marketing. It’s about time for digital marketers to recognize that there’s a fine line between hyper-personalized ads and irrelevant generic ads.

How Can You Personalize Your Ads the Right Way?

Most customers prefer their favorite brands to understand their preferences and offer services or products specially curated for them. People thrive on the uniqueness of personalized marketing; they like when brands show them that they care. But they also like to be in control of their data.

A regular data marketers’ access from third-party cookies comprises of cookie-cutter marketing-relevant information (personal data such as age, gender, and location (if readable), visited website via which the cookie was generated, subpages visited on the visited website, time spent on the page and its subpages) which every other marketer out there is already utilizing and contributes little toward creating hyper-personalized with a high conversion potential.

Back to the question, how can digital marketers serve ethical and user-approved hyper-personalized ads?

With ReverseAds’ keyword roadmapping algorithm, marketers will be able to serve personalized ads to customers during their entire purchase path without the use of third-party cookies by putting first-party data to work.

• Unlike other programmatic advertising solutions, ReverseAds applies our proprietary keyword assignment algorithm for data enrichment within the ecosystem to pinpoint the highest-intent buyers for your products or services.
• We utilize anonymized, unstructured data along with big data predictive technologies to identify keyword clusters that best indicate user behaviors using our keyword algorithm.
• Driven by AI and machine learning, our keyword algorithm learns predictive paths of user engagement through content, scores purchase intent, and assigns the highest probability keywords to specific machine IDs.
• This not only offers precise audience targeting, but also ensures you reach your customers one-on-one with personalized ads along their purchase path.

The Single Customer View can then be used to understand customer requirements and up to date communications preferences using unique, relevant and accurate information that a user has willingly shared with you, removing the possibility of mismatched identities or the customer being unnerved by ‘creepy’ tracking, and making it much more likely that, as an engaged follower that knows and trusts your brand, the individual can be tempted to make a purchase.

By using first party data in this way, to match against an audience in Facebook or other customer-facing platforms, digital marketers will be able to make ad targeting more effective and reduce wastage, whilst ReverseAds’ keyword algorithm and web app platform will enable brands to stop advertising a product to customers that have already purchased it.

Contact us check our Facebook and LinkedIn to find out more about ReverseAds web app platform that allows marketers to successful launch keyword ad campaigns through serving relevant personalized ads to your customers.