New Data Connections & the Auto Marketing of the Future Gumtree’s new data tool ‘Audience Engine’ is making a splash in the marketing world and was recently the focus of a fascinating panel discussion on Gumtree Media’s podcast UpNext: The Future is Sustainable.
which we can then track and report on store visitation, dealership visitations, even travel behaviours in near-real time to validate and provide metrics back to our partners like Gumtree”.
In the second episode of the podcast (a three-part series for Australian media, marketing and advertising professionals), host Tim Burrowes welcomes panelists Tim Lloyd, senior manager, adtech and data at Gumtree; Boris Guennewig, co-founder and CTO at Smrtr Data, and Tom Gregory, country manager ANZ, Lifesight. The resulting conversation offers unique insights into the way in which new data technology can be harnessed to create more effective and reliable connections between brands and consumers.
Attribution proves to be a key focus during the discussion - a concept with significant implications for the industry. Tim reminds us of the old marketing adage that “you know half your market dollars are wasted but you don’t know which half”, and warns that marketers who blindly follow strategies that generate good CPLs may not actually be seeing sales at the end of the day, meaning they’ll be receiving skewed information about attribution and an incomplete picture of their marketing strategy effectiveness.
The episode begins with a run down by Tim Lloyd about just how the Audience Engine tool can maximise efficiency for advertisers by providing precision targeting at different stages of the customer journey. As Tim explains, Audience Engine allows brand partners to take advantage of the 360 degree view Gumtree has across its network audience - a combined population of 7.8 million* people or 3.5 million** logged-in identities.
Tom explains that Lifesight offers an online-to-offline attribution solution, starting with a baseline of non-exposed IDs. “Looking at that non-exposed baseline and then looking at the footfall conversion rate of a Gumtree-exposed audience, we’re able to provide a bit more validation through that uplift metric”.
Uniquely placed to understand consumer interest and shopping trends, Tim says it gives Gumtree visibility on users’ evolving life stages too. “We can see when they move out of the family home, get married and start a family and see when they’re upsizing their home or car. We can look at what sellers are listing today, and that gives us visibility on future purchase intent. That’s really exciting for brands because 90%† of Aussie sellers consider replacing their preloved items with new items”. A Promising New Partnership The podcast also bears witness to the unveiling of a fruitful new relationship between Gumtree, Smtr Data and Lifesight. According to Boris, Smrtr Data has a single customer view on 16 million Australians and 8-9 million Australian households. “When a data partner like Gumtree comes to us, we match their first-party data into our backend in a very prudent way. We get a match rate of over 5 million data points, which is quite beautiful to see. We have actually been quite lucky over the last few years - the base of our data was individuals not IP addresses and browser behaviour, therefore the cookieless world is actually a bit of a good thing for us because we wouldn’t be targeted by that”. As Tim Lloyd points out, the two data companies are natural partners to Gumtree with complementary data assets. By bringing their unique data capabilities to the table, Gumtree gains better visibility on consumer personas and can drive better outcomes for brand partners and marketers. Most importantly, he says, the two companies’ technologies help Gumtree to attribute campaign effectiveness between offline and online channels.
A is for Attribution
Boris agrees that attribution is key for the marketers of today. “It’s more the laser focus than the broad attribution that we are going for these days in comparison to the old world where you would try to drive a lot of content and segments in a rather unspecific way. I think precision is the key these days”. Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond With a cookies environment that is changing dramatically, what do the panellists think that means for marketers? All three agree the changes will mean more fenced gardens. Tom points to the value of first-party data in such an environment: “Being able to access a data economy where first-party data owners can enrich their data with other datasets that might exist within those fenced gardens in order to better understand their audience in larger environments”. He also points to the bringing together of trusted first, second, and third-party data sets as a means of helping measurement capabilities beyond third-party cookies. And what of the marketing environment we’ll find ourselves in in the future, even just two years from now? Host Tim Burrowes puts this question to the panelists, asking them to paint a picture of the marketing environment of tomorrow. Their expert opinions and crystal ball gazing? Well you’ll just have to tune into the podcast and listen to hear their thoughts on how it will all pan out! To hear for yourself, click here.
Tom agrees, explaining that Lifesight’s data tech allows his team to enrich Gumtree ad campaign data with identity attributes to then monitor exposed users in the offline world. “By that we mean tracking mobile ID data - anonymised mobile device data *Nielsen Digital Content Planning, Nov 2020- Aug 2021, P2+, Digital (C/M), Text, Gumtree, Autotrader, CarsGuide, Total De-Duplicated Unique Audience
**Gumtree Internal Data, Average 22 Q3Monthly 2021 Logged In Users, Jan-Sep 2021 † Gumtree Circular Economy Research 2021
Traction
