A big facet of delivering digital coupons to users revolves around capturing consumer data and using it to provide personalized offers. Big data partnerships have enabled the rise of retargeting to high intent users wherever they may go on the web. Hundreds of DSPs have risen to provide an array of retargeting options for marketers. In a nutshell, retargeting is about taking the information a user leaves, such as a user visiting your site and not completing an offer and using that information to target that same user in another site and so on. With the rise of mobile, marketers can also leverage mobile channels and deliver coupons directly to phones as we talked about above.
These coupons can be shown on smartphones and their barcodes scanned at registers. If NFC is enabled, a consumer simply has to wave or tap their smartphone in front of a POS terminal to pay. A key player in this space is Google Wallet. Users simply have to setup an account, download the app to their smartphone, link their credit and debit cards, designate a preferred card to use and start shopping. The beautiful thing is that Google stores information about consumer shopping behavior, allowing them to profile each user and what they are most likely to buy. Armed with this information, Google can detect intent of a user or simply know where a user is using location-detection and provide a custom offer that appears right within a user's mobile device if they are near the merchant offering the deal. Google captures information from users through what they search, their clicks on those search results, web crawling, website analytics and data around ads and which ones consumers are engaging with. Email is also a cornerstone of Google's data strategy along with Tweets thanks to a deal Google struck with Twitter last year.
Google's plethoras of products such as Google Finance and Translate also provide key insight into users. In regards to Google Wallet, Google will be able to harness all the payment information of users and provide a channel to send offers and coupons that will have a higher conversion rate. In fact, Google has a specific patent entitled: Method of obtaining and using anonymous consumer purchase and demographic data that was filed in May of 2006. The invention relates to a novel method of obtaining this data from an identifiable card that a user registers. All the sales information captured from this multi vendor capable instrument like name, phone number and such is captured during purchases made post-acceptance of the purchase.
Facebook has been experimenting in this space as well, culling personal information from outside the social network and matching it with data submitted by its massive 1B+ user base. Facebook marries what they know about a user from their vast troves of 'likes' and friend interests to data acquired from 3rd party data marketers such as Datalogix, who are getting their information from items and brands consumers purchase through sources like loyalty-card programs, creating a compelling value proposition that utilizes consumers' offline purchase history to target and retarget them with personalized offers. For example, a boutique jeweler can target a woman who buys a lot of upscale garments from say Prada.
These abilities are drawing in big brands ranging from General Motors to PepsiCo who are starting to spend more and more through Facebook. Mobile app players like Foursquare have also entered the game, selling data encapsulated in its 3.5B check-ins to help advertisers reach consumers. Foursquare is aiming to empower advertisers in more finely targeting ads they purchase through ad exchanges using Foursquare's location and behavioral data. Despite privacy concerns, expect the trend of data aggregation to continue in providing consumers a more personalized experience that will ultimately draw more and more ad dollars to the ecosystem.
