Looking for a highly educated audience with your marketing spend? Check your data sources!

Many marketers direct ads at an educated audience, utilizing 3rd party segments with a college degree or higher, as the ideal consumers to receive their messages. But are they actually reaching those audiences? In our work, scoring data and measuring audiences, we see a lot of inaccurate data, and this segment is no different.

Within a large cohort of data segments from different providers, the average Truthscore™ for “College Graduate” segments is .44, and the range was .20-.79.

(A Truthscore™ is our method for quantifying the likelihood that record-level consumer data, whether 1st, 2nd, or 3rd party, is accurate, yielding a score between 0.00 and 1.00.)

Since the average Truthscore™ of 0.44 shows that 44% of consumers in those segments were college graduates, that means that 56% — over half! — of records were NOT college grads.

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, in this example IDs of college graduates. 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.