It’s August and all good marketers know what that means, back to school time!

How do you verify that your ad spend is reaching people that have children in the home and might be in the market for new 3-ring binders and lunchboxes?

We’ve all seen amazing marketing efforts for Back to School campaigns,

from Amazon’s ad highlighting student aspirations to Kleenex’s tearjerking #ShareKleenexCare. These heartstring-tugging ads are great for getting our attention, but are they actually being seen by the families looking to spend money on back-to-school clothes and supplies?

For the first time, Truthset offers you the only way to accurately select the segments to target people with children and measure if you’ve reached them with your campaign impressions.

Like many demographic attributes, there’s a wide range of accuracy amongst “Presence of Children” audiences as measured by Truthscores ™, our proprietary method for validating the accuracy of segments using a wisdom-of-the-crowds methodology, sourced from 15+ respected data providers. The range of Truthscores ™ for these segments was .31-.67, with an average of .38, meaning that there’s only, on average, a 38% chance that these segments are actually individuals who have children in their households. That’s a lot of wasted spend on the other people in those segments without children!

What can a marketer do? In general, marketers should be careful to work with reputable data providers to ensure they are buying accurate demographic segments. To really ensure that spend is being directed towards accurate segments, Truthset can help optimize campaigns and measure after to ensure the right audiences were reached, beyond just age and gender. Contact us to find out how.