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Age and gender are the basis for demographic targeting. Almost any demographically-targeted campaign begins with these attributes. For simplicity, many marketers choose to use combined segments, and it’s an obvious choice. Why select the age segments you want and then overlap against gender, which might compound any errors in the data, when you can select a segment that already captures your ideal audience, like m18-24?
In our work, scoring data and measuring audiences, we see a lot of inaccurate data, and this type of segment is no different. Combined age and gender segments are at a minumum 10% less accurate than age-only segments and can be up to 58% less accurate, depending on the data provider.
Gender segments alone also perform better than combined age/gender ones, on average they are at least 21% more accurate and up to 59% more accurate.
So how do you avoid spending money on those records that aren’t in your target market? It’s simple! The easiest way to improve your targeting is to use Truthset Scored segments, available wherever you buy 3rd party segments, like LiveRamp Data Marketplace, Adobe’s AAM and TubeMogul, Lotame, The Trade Desk, Xandr, AdSquare, Salesforce/Krux, etc.
Truthset Scored segments only include the records that meet a threshold for accuracy, meaning we’ve removed the IDs least likely to be the purported attribute of the segment. This leaves only the more validated IDs for advertisers to run their impressions against.
If you have any questions about how you can improve the ROI of your marketing with independently validated audience segments, contact us.