3 Ways the Mobile Advertiser ID (MAID) Helps You Know Your Audience

Editor's Note: This post has been republished from Mobilewalla's website. Mobilewalla is a Marketing AI Institute partner.

Consumers today overwhelmingly expect personalized experiences. 90% of survey respondents between the ages of 18 to 64 found personalized content very or somewhat appealing, with just four percent saying that they found it not very or not at all appealing. Personalization is growing in importance for younger people especially, with 44% of Gen Z consumers saying they are more likely to provide their personal data for a more personalized digital experience and 50% would leave a website if it didn’t predict their needs.

This rapidly shifting attitude presents a significant opportunity for marketers to find new and effective ways to engage consumers with the right content at the right time.

That said, delivering a truly personalized experience requires connecting consumer behavior across channels, both online and offline, which can be difficult. Sufficient data is rarely available and the systems that contain customer analytics are often siloed and don’t integrate. Also, many interactions are effectively invisible. Meaning, if a customer walks into a store and browses for a few minutes and then walks out without making a purchase, that customer interaction isn’t recorded anywhere and therefore can’t be used in building a portrait of that customer’s activity. Fortunately, there is one persistent identifier that marketers can use to solve this problem; the mobile advertiser ID.

Building a Comprehensive Customer Profile with the MAID

The mobile advertiser ID, also known as the MAID, is a unique string of digits that identifies a specific mobile device. The MAID can be used to connect digital, mobile, and in-store behavior across channels, creating a complete customer view that offers deeper, more valuable insight. Since consumers have their devices with them at all times, the MAID is the most precise and persistent link to location-based activities. MAIDs can also be connected with IP addresses to create a link to the online world and can be used to track app usage.

Here are three key ways that you can use the MAID to better understand your audience and build more comprehensive consumer profiles:

1. Where do they go?

Where are the places that this person visits regularly? How far do they commute to and from work each day, and how active are they? What insights can you gain by examining where someone spends their time?

As you can imagine, the answers to these questions can shed a lot of light on a consumer or audience segment and provide you with some key insights that can be used to drive brand strategy, including:

• Understanding who is driving past your retail location as part of their daily commute for targeted messaging. 
• Retargeting individuals who have visited your location in-person or who have attended an event hosted by, or that included, your brand.
• Determine the effectiveness of your digital advertising campaigns through location visitation attribution.
  

2. What media does this person regularly consume?

How do they spend time interacting with their mobile device? What apps do they use and what media do they regularly consume?

Just like location data, app and media usage also contributes to a comprehensive consumer profile by providing insights about interests, demographics, behaviors, and more. These kinds of   insights can help you enrich your existing data with behavioral, demographic and location information to better understand your customers interests and actions – and market to them accordingly.

3. What does their household look like?

What indicates that individuals share a household? What are the demographics, behaviors and brand preferences?

Who a person lives with can have a tremendous influence on buying patterns and brand affinity. It is often easier to sell a product or service to someone if someone else in the household is already a user or subscriber.

How MAID Data Helps You Differentiate Trends from Anomalies

Marketers and data scientists must have access to enough data history to identify long-term trends in behavior as opposed to anomalies. Without sufficient data, it’s impossible to gain accurate insights into your audience because you’re forced to make assumptions.

For example, you would want to avoid labeling someone’s interest as “health and fitness” if they visited a gym twice in one week, but never went back. Access to breadth (a wide variety) and depth (data collected over time) of data, like data collected from the mobile advertiser ID, is critical to building a complete picture of your customer and modeling customer behavior.

How Detailed Consumer Profiles Provide a Competitive Edge

The MAID helps you better understand your customers and prospects by aggregating and associating location data, app usage, and household information.  So how can you apply that information to get ahead of your competition? Data scientists, data analysts, marketers, and researchers can pinpoint opportunities for improvement in targeting, messaging, and other strategic initiatives to increase marketing performance and maximize ROI:

• Enrich your existing data to retain and grow your existing business with highly personalized engagement.
• Better understand, segment and target audiences with relevant content and offers.
• Optimize and attribute advertising spend to understand the most effective use of budget.
• Create high value look-a-like audiences to improve customer acquisition and expand reach.