Introducing Custom Audiences

What would you do if you had 70% of your day back? Or could cut out 70% of waste from your marketing budget? What if you could focus your efforts on the visitors that were likely to convert and market just to them?

We have previously shown that Click360’s Graph + Deep Learning approach can automatically learn the patterns of behavior that indicate buyer intent, and target the visitors at the top of the funnel that are likely to actually purchase–even in a long, complex sales cycle. Using just that approach, for one B2B company we have been able identify the 30% of customers that drove 99% of revenue using only behavioral patterns.

But we wanted to do better. We know that our customers and digital marketing partners have deep knowledge of the underlying business–patterns that even the best artificial intelligence cannot detect, or that are simply not in past data–and we wanted to empower them to combine that knowledge with the patterns Click360 learns.

The result is our new Custom Audiences.

How Do Custom Audiences Work?

Custom audiences combine the power of Click360’s pattern recognition with attributes more common to platforms without personally identifiable information (such as Facebook, or Google Analytics). The result is that you can combine anonymous and known attributes and integrate with those types of platforms for highly targeted tactics, such as ad re-targeting. And, of course, you can see the descriptive and predictive analytics reports for all audiences.

The way it works is simple: you define a custom audience (see the screens below), and Click360 automatically identifies new visitors and leads that meet the criteria for the audience. It can then report the results, predict future results based on what it knows (for more rapid iteration), and integrate with your other systems.

Ultimately, we want to treat similar people similarly, and target the groups that are most effective for driving revenue.

Step 1. Define the Audience

To get started with Custom Audiences, you must first define an audience.

At a minimum, a Custom Audience must have a unique identifier and rolling or specific date range:

All other attributes and filters are optional.

If we consider the scenario of ad retargeting, you may want to only target unknown visitors (visitors who have not already filled out a form) who are very likely to become leads with a bit more prodding. These are people who have displayed an interesting pattern. We want to focus on, say, the 30% of people who may purchase from you and ignore the 70% who won’t.

For that purpose, you may use the behavioral features to, say, only target unknown visitors who are 15% or more likely to convert to an opportunity using our Behavior – Cluster filter:

Because you have particular domain knowledge, you may also want to filter based on how they came to your website or found out about your company. For example, if they interacted with a particular campaign and medium, or interacted with your blog:

You might also want to limit your audience to visitors of certain countries:

Or use the location clusters that Click360 learned about your visitors:

Or even specify visitors within a certain distance of custom points you select on a map, for example to target the Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York City, and San Francisco areas:

That is likely sufficient, but perhaps you would like to add other filters. For example, perhaps you want to target particular browsers, platform, or operating systems (e.g., maybe your application only runs on Windows):

Finally, if you wanted to add custom attributes and only target known contacts–perhaps people who were previously placed in the nurture bucket but now display patterns that indicate buing intent–you can add specific filters related to their: (1) title, (2) title classification, (3) vertical or industry, (4) number of prior opportunities, or (5) top level domains (e.g., filter out .edu domains):

At this point, you have a highly targeted audience. We’ll talk about what you can do with that next.

Step 2. Use the Custom Audience with Your Transactional Systems

Once an audience is created and populated, you can push it into your transactional systems (Click360 is an analytical platform). That can be either an existing integration or by sending the relevant data and history to a custom integration.

For example, you can use the Custom Audience for re-targeting, or to insert known leads in the audience into a “smart list” in your marketing automation platform, or even to integrate with your own predictive models.

The standard integration screen is simple:

(Remember: if you have an integration you would like, please let us know so we can prioritize it.)

From there, Click360 continually updates the audience and pushes them into the transactional systems. But the final opportunity is to see how your audience is performing.

Step 3. Setup Reports for Your Custom Audience

Finally, you can monitor your Custom Audience’s results the same way you would monitor campaigns, media, sources, referrers, content, etc., by using the Create Report interface:

I prefer to set recurring reports and have them emailed directly to me, but that’s a matter of preference.

Regardless of how you set them up, the reports should look fairly familiar, with the “funnel”, the list of leads and opportunities, the statuses, and the usual reporting features:

Next Steps

We are very excited about the new Custom Audiences capabilities and have received tremendous early feedback from digital marketers.

In the near future, we expect to be able to propose entirely new custom audiences to target with particular content, in the same way that we can propose tactics for our behavior clusters. We will also add new features (e.g., active during time of day) and improve the reporting features, but we are pleased to have this released.

Finally, we’re extremely interested in your feedback and suggestions you may have. Please contact us directly if you have suggestions.

And, of course, if you are reading this blog and have not already started to use the power of Click360’s Graph + Deep Learning analytics we would be happy to setup a demo or a pilot program for your company. Thanks for reading!