Audience Enrichment and Audience Extension allow a client to make the most out of their use of first and third party data. By allowing clients to target users based on behaviors they’ve displayed off-site or to reach users on other properties, both Audience Extension and Audience Enrichment increase the options one has when responding to RFPs. But what is the difference between these very confusing terms.
What is Audience Extension?
Audience extension expands a target audience through the purchase of additional uniques or similar audiences from an outside source, in order to increase the reach (size) of a particular campaign.
Audience definitions are matched against a population (group) of user profiles. In a regular, non-extension audience, the audience definition is matched only against the client’s first party profiles. The maximum size of that audience is thus limited to the total number of users the client has interacted with directly. As seen in the below diagram, that may be a small subset of the entire Lotame DMP profile population.
When an audience is created using reach extension, the population used to match the audience is no longer limited to first party profiles. A profile can match even if the client has not directly interacted with that user. This can dramatically increase the size of the population available for the audience. Reach extension defines only which profiles will even be considered for matching. It does not affect what data is available.
A Visual Representation of Audience Extension
The relationship between a client’s first party profiles, LDX profiles, and Lotame DMP profiles may be visualized by the following Venn diagram:
Note: If you save an audience on extension, the audience statistics reported in the UI will only be on overlap. We cannot report on uniques for which we do not have a profile in Lotame. Therefore, exporting this audience to your ad server, will provide forecasting statistics.
What is Audience Enrichment?
Audience Enrichment is the process of using third-party data to learn more about the interests displayed by users when they are off property. Audience enrichment increases the reach of audiences belonging to a demographic or exhibiting a certain behavior by purchasing these additional insights from a third-party supplier. This can dramatically increase the size of the population available for the audience.
Both audience extension and audience enrichment can be used to make your audiences more powerful. They can be used to either find additional users like the ones you are already targeting, or you can use enrichment to lear more about your audience and what they do off your properties or when not interacting with your brand. In the quest to learn more about your audience and increase engagement, both of these strategies can be implemented to increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.