4.2 How do I collect audience information – legally? - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->So how do we collect information about our audience,</v> and how do we make sure that we're doing it legally, that we're not violating any of the new privacy regulations out there? That's what we're gonna talk about in this section, so let's start by thinking about how market research is usually done. So traditionally you'd use focus groups, you'd use surveys, and you can still use those approaches for digital marketing, for content marketing, those offline approaches still work. You'd probably use them to research products, but you may not research your audiences to understand exactly what kind of content they might be interested in. So these approaches still work, they're kind of expensive, so a lot of times we've moved either to online versions of those traditional market research methods, or we've replaced them or augmented them with new methods that are digitally based. So social listening software that mines what people are saying on Twitter and other social channels, that can help you understand what your audience is saying, but you also might want to know what they're doing, so looking at search keywords, using your web analytics software to see what they're doing on your website, these are things that help you understand how your audience is taking action. So social listening has a unique set of metrics that you don't see in other areas of marketing or market research. So volume is one of them, so is the volume of conversation about the subjects you're interested in on social media going up or going down? But that's not always the greatest metric to use because as social media usage keeps increasing, volume on everything is always going up, at least slightly, and so sometimes it's more interesting to look at what's called share of voice. Share of voice says, on this topic, is the volume of conversation about me going up or down compared to our competitors? Or if I'm looking at several different topics, is the volume of conversation going up or down compared to other topics? That's share of voice, and that will kind of take into account that all of the volume tends to go up. What subjects are they talking about, what topics? These are things that might be really important to understand your audience. And sentiment, so what do they think of you or your competitors? You can also use sentiment to understand when people are having problems. If a certain topic is often spoken about with negative sentiment, that might indicate a problem, that could be a place for you to understand your audience better and come to the rescue with a solution. That solution could be in the form of content, and it could be in the form of your product. Searchers tend to use very similar words to each other, and Google Trends can compare keyword volumes. You can also use Google Ads if you have a paid search account, that might give you more detailed data on areas that might not have as high a search volume. Google Trends tends to work really well for popular keywords, but not necessarily for keywords that are deeper than that. You can see that by using Google Trends or using Google Ads and comparing certain similar keywords to each other, you can determine which ones are in higher usage. That might not only help you know how to target ads in search, but it could also help you speak your customer's language by using the language that they do. But how do we collect all this data legally? That's something that's become really important the last few years, starting with a regulation called GDPR that came in in Europe just a few years ago. Now, it was the first privacy regulation but it's not the last, and all of them tend to be fairly similar to GDPR from the European Union, but they have some variations that you ought to think about, and you ought to talk to your legal counselor or your privacy officer in your company, if you have one, and get the details about how you comply. In general, there's a few different things. You need to make sure that customers are informed when you're collecting their data, that you give them access to the data. They talk about personally identifiable information as the data that's protected, so it's something that could help you know who a person is. Your audience can tell you to forget any data you have about them, to correct it, or ask you to give them a copy of it so that they can actually move it somewhere else. Now, it used to be that more data was always better, and so Werner Vogel, one of the first CTOs at Amazon, said, "You can never have too much data. Bigger is definitely better.", the problem is that that might not be true anymore because the more data you have, the harder it is to make sure that you've collected it properly and for you to protect it and comply with all those regulations. And so the new world of privacy has really changed everything, and now people are paying much closer attention to what data they hang on to, and whether they're actually complying with these rules. And so GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect in 2018 in the European Union, and it has enormous penalties for violations. Up to 4% of worldwide revenue or 20 million euros, whichever is highest, so you should probably pay attention to this. Now, the fines generally are reserved for companies that have kind of understood the regulations, maybe been warned, and are still proceeding, but there's been several court cases so far where fines have been levied, and so the thing to focus on is that you are complying as best you can, and that you pay very careful attention, ignorance is not really going to help you here. And so the basic principles of GDPR, this is the I am not a lawyer version, is that we're not sure yet whether it applies to European citizens, or to European residents, no matter where they're from, but it could apply to European citizens living in the US and in other countries. And so, again, talk to your counsel, talk to your privacy officer about how to handle this, but my advice would be that if you're a company that does business worldwide, you should generally try and comply with all privacy regulations everywhere. It's the simplest and safest thing to do, it does mean that you're gonna have to understand all the regulations, it does mean you're gonna have to put effort into compliance, but it would even be more effort to try and figure out how to pick and choose which people you're being compliant with which regulations for, and I think it's an expense that isn't worth it, especially as the regulations continue to change, so I would just look at that super set and try and comply with that for everybody. Now, this has caused a data problem for marketers. Marketers need personal information to fuel their traditional technology and other approaches. The vast majority of their visitors are anonymous, and they've been trying to collect PII, personally identifiable information, from those visitors, but the world has turned against that personal data. And you might not realize that PII is not just someone's name or their phone number or an email address, it could even be something like their IP address, the number that kind of indicates where they are located on the internet, because it could be that that IP address uniquely identifies an address, maybe even their home address, and so you have to really pay attention to what's considered to be PII. Now some companies know a lot about their customers, so the big tech companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook, they know almost everything about who's using their site. They know who's searching on Google, Amazon knows when you're browsing on their site because you did that one-click checkout thing, Facebook obviously knows who you are, and so some of these companies know an awful lot about you. And B2C companies can buy customer data, they have to be really careful now that it was collected properly, but they can buy customer data and maybe about 30 to 50% of their audience, they might actually be able to know information about them. But what about B2B companies? For them it's a lot harder. Only about 3 to 5% of the visitors to an average B2B site are known, it's very rare that visitors to B2B sites even log in and tell them who they are. And so what happens to all that anonymous data, what are they doing with this information? Well, they try to attack it with something called account-based marketing, and so sometimes they can understand who the company is, or the industry, maybe they could get another 10 to 20% if everybody was working at company locations, but that's actually not what's happening right now. And so as we tape this, there's still massive numbers of people working from home, and it's not clear whether that's really going to turn around. We expect some people to be returning to the office, we expect some people to be returning to job locations, but it could be that we're never gonna have as many people in company fixed locations as we used to. And so using that IP address, that location on the internet to know what company a person is coming from, that used to work fairly well, you might even get up to 30% of your visitors known, now we've seen that for some businesses they're seeing less than 5% actually have an IP address that they can tie to a company, and almost all of them are actually coming through different types of internet providers and they have no idea where those people are or what company they're from. These aren't the only challenges to understanding who your customers are. Anonymity is actually spreading, not just from privacy regulations but also on restrictions about cookies. So first-party cookies are being restricted, so first-party cookies are cookies that your company drops. Third-party cookies are cookies that are dropped on your behalf by, usually, an advertising platform. Those are actually coming to an end in many cases, depending on the browser, and there's also anonymity that's being put into place for advertising based on different platforms. All of these things are restricting marketers' ability to understand who the people are that they're attracting with their marketing. And the reason that's happening is because that's what your audience wants, so there have been enormous numbers of data breaches and regulators have now started to step in, and the industry has stepped in, as we've just shown you, to restrict how you're collecting the data. Now you might ask, how did we get here? Well, it's from something called a DMP, a Data Management Platform, that has grown up around the advertising business and it stores all sorts of data on audiences that you can reach. And it's usually associated with those ad platforms called DSPs, Demand Side Platforms, such as Google Ads. And so when you use a DMP to combine that third-party data from your DMP's partners with your first-party data, well, now you've started to collect a really nice database that you could use to understand customers, but the question is, are you doing it in compliance with the privacy laws, and can you continue to do this as restrictions on cookies become pervasive? And so let's look at this different type of data so that we understand what we're talking about here. So first-party data is data that you've collected yourself, and so you don't have to pay anybody to get it because it's usually people who have come to your website, but that means that you've created an experience or created some kind of content that caused people to come, and that gives it limited reach, really you're only able to collect data about people who've already discovered you. Now, if you do a good job collecting and maintaining that data, the quality can be very high, and you can use this data to retarget people that you've already interacted with. So, for example, you might be able to use retargeted ads with your first-party data so that you might pay more money for an ad going after someone who you know has been to your website already. What about second-party data? Second-party data is simply another company's first-party data, so what does that mean? It means that you have a partner who has collected their own first-party data, and you've negotiated some type of deal to share that data. Maybe you did a joint webinar with them and they collected all the information, and now as part of that webinar deal, you're sharing that information because perhaps you sponsored that webinar. Now it's time-consuming to negotiate all the different deals that you have to do, these bilateral deals with all these second-party data sources, but the data quality is pretty high, just as your first-party data is pretty high. And you can use this to target another company's audience, so if you have another company that is selling products to your same audience, not a competitor, of course, but they might be selling supplies for your product, that would be a way for you to be able to share data with each other and get more information about your audience. Their data that they've licensed to you is, to you, second-party data. And how about third-party data? Well, a data exchange, ad networks usually have third-party data, cookie aggregators often have third-party data, and so that third-party data is someone who's collecting data as their business, and they will sell their data to all comers. Now this has the most data, so the highest reach in being able to cover your audience, but data quality is often spotty, it depends on who the vendor is whether the data has been maintained and whether they've actually done a good job of collecting it. But you can use this to go after markets that have not discovered you and have not discovered your partners, so where first-party data and second-party data have limited reach, third-party data can have a lot of reach. Now these privacy regulations have big implications for collection of first, second, and third-party data. For first-party data, the biggest implications are around how you collect it and maintain it, so if you follow GDPR and those other regulations, then you can do a good job of collecting the data properly. For second-party data it's very similar, but you have to make sure that your contracts that license that data force your partners to be collecting the data properly. Now, second-party data might become even more important than it ever was, you might find that it's worthwhile for you to form many, many more partnerships, because as third-party data becomes harder to collect, having more partnerships for second-party data might help your reach. And that third-party data, the consent is less likely for that, and so you might want to focus your third-party data on one-time usage of anonymized data, rather than trying to store that data and collect it and keep it permanently. Because if you just use it once, you haven't stored the data and you don't have to focus on a lot of the privacy regulations, which are mostly about what you store, remember and keep, and so using something for one time, again, talk to your lawyer about this, but using something one time might be the best usage for third-party data. Now, what does GDPR not mean? Well, you might hear people say, "Hey, analytics is dead, you can't collect information about people anymore", well, it's not true. If you have permission and you can retain it, you can do everything you did before. Now is it a lot harder to get that permission? Yes, it is, but all the information is still out there and available if you're a trustworthy company that people want to give permission to. And other people say personalization is dead, well, that's not true either. A lot of personalization was based on all of this personally identifiable information, but you can anonymize IP addresses with something called a one-way hash, and so if you've done that, you might be able to keep information about people that is not personally identifiable information, but it is information about the person to help you do personalization.