Data Exchange: How Does It Work?

Published on October 31, 2018

Last modified on November 14, 2023

What Is a Data Exchange?

A data exchange shares data between various stakeholders. A data exchange provides access to data points from around the world to fuel data-driven marketing activities and advertising. With access to a DMP, you’re able to take previously outdated or unavailable data and use it to power your marketing campaigns.

Lotame’s global data exchange (LDX) is one of the most extensive data exchanges, providing instantaneous access to thousands of audience segments built up from countless data sources from around the world. When you choose Lotame’s data exchange (LDX), you gain easy access to in-depth knowledge of your market and customers.

Audience segments from Lotame are available in over all major ad platforms, from The Trade Desk and AppNexus to Google and more. This wide availability allows every agency, marketer and publisher to access intelligent and powerful third-party data from the largest exchange worldwide.

How a Data Exchange Can Expand Your Target Audience

Expand Your Target Audience

While most organizations collect and analyze their first-party data gathered from their websites, social media accounts, purchase data and email lists, this data only gives them a fraction of the available information about their potential audience and how to reach them. Data Exchanges like LDX provide access to real, accurate, up-to-date information from multiple data types and sources, including:

Website Data: Collect declared and demonstrated consumer behavioral data from websites, identifying audience interests.
Social Data: Collect information on both declared and demonstrated social actions, including shared content, posts, votes and more.
Mobile Data: Collect demographic and behavioral mobile data across millions of devices around the globe.
CRM Data: Collect demographic and behavioral data from customer reporting management services from businesses worldwide.
B2B Data: Collect professional and company data for market and competition analyses.
Purchase Data: Collect data on customer purchase information from over 4,500 global retailers.
TV Viewership Data: Activate TV show and commercial audiences from opted-in Smart TVs to augment your marketing initiatives across digital screens. TV + Digital audience activation has never been easier. Learn more about Lotame TV Data Exchange.

A data exchange gives you access to as many data points as you need, which you can use to fill in any gaps of information about your current audience, to learn what their interests are when they aren’t on your site. Even more powerful, however, is Lotame’s ability to help you expand your target audience. Using Lotame’s variety of data types and our ready-to-use bundled audience segments, you can better understand your target audience and potential new segments. Identify and use behavioral patterns, demographic similarities, common devices used, and interests or affinity groups within your audience base, then use this information to expand your understanding of your target audience, and extrapolate potential new audiences based on the data you’ve collected about your current customer base.

One important expert recommendation when using a data exchange is to make sure the data is accurate and high quality. Read more about Lotame’s commitment to data quality.

Use this information to build out your campaigns and create carefully crafted, highly accurate marketing and communication activities that are sure to convert. You have the opportunity with a data exchange to make the most of the available data, so you can make sure that your efforts are progressing toward real results and an excellent ROI.

Who Needs a Data Exchange?

A Data exchange is an essential resource for publishers, marketers and agencies who simply do not have enough first-party data to make widespread campaign decisions, or are looking for more information about the consumers they already have. Instead, they can turn to Lotame’s data exchange to give them the information they need to maximize their strategy and move forward with confidence. Here are just a few ways that agencies, marketers and publishers can use a data exchange to maximize their results.

1. Agencies

A data exchange helps agencies rise above the competition and excel past client expectations, providing them with access to data that they wouldn’t normally see while allowing them to focus their campaign efforts, increase their engagement and centralize and manage their customer’s databases. With Lotame’s data exchange, agencies can:

Target Customers: With a data exchange system, agencies can get a holistic view of their consumers, identifying and targeting consumers who are more likely to respond and finding similar individuals who may be easy to convert.
Find New Potential Consumers: Reach new audiences beyond those known to you to increase your campaign scale for advertisers
Share Insights: If an agency finds that something is useful for future campaigns, the agency can share these audience profile reports or campaign wrap-up reports with their clients, making both of you smarter at once, to help improve future efforts.

All of this information can help agencies achieve more relevant content and delivery, allowing for maximum engagement that will keep their clients coming back for more.

2. Marketers

Marketers Data Exchange

Lotame’s data management platform and data exchange enable marketers to learn more about their most valuable customers, and easily find and target more of them on any device. With a data exchange system, marketers can:

Learn About Your Audiences: Marketers can become experts on the audiences they want to target with a data exchange, gaining a holistic view of all their customers across their multiple screens and devices. Lotame facilitates this by collecting actionable data from multiple sources and platforms and using this data to generate audience profile and campaign wrap-up reports that offer a deeper understanding of what your customers respond to and are interested in.
Extend Reach: Not only can Lotame help you understand your audience, but it allows you to find more potential consumers to extend your campaign across screens. Targeting and retargeting customers across multiple devices allows you to develop a creative, sequential message that is sure to capture their attention and interest.

With these tools, marketers can increase engagement with unique messaging strategies that can help them draw in both old and new valuable consumers.

3. Publishers

Publishers Data Exchange

Publishers can use Lotame’s data management system and data exchange to impress their advertisers and optimize their campaigns, creating messages that draw in their audiences. With Lotame’s data management platform, publishers can:

Impress Advertisers: Publishers can make the most of their digital properties by extracting valuable insights about their target audiences. With this information, publishers can impress advertisers with in-depth analyses of their target audiences, including which demographics respond best to their campaigns.
Increase CTR: With better data about site visitors, publishers can experience a higher click-through rate (CTR) by targeting the right audience on the right platform at the right time with content that is personalized and relevant.
Increase Conversions: With a higher CTR, publishers can also look forward to more conversions from audience member to customer, improving profits with each click.

Regardless of your role, a data exchange is an excellent resource for making better decisions for data-driven campaigns through enhancing your understanding of your target markets.

The Data Exchange Is Modern Data Analysis for a Modern World

To understand why the data exchange is so important when trying to capture today’s consumer, it’s important to understand how today’s consumer has evolved in the digital age. Before the information age, the primary strategy for marketers was the straightforward sales pitch. Whether it was a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, a direct mail ad for furniture or a television commercial, the basic framework of their message was, “We have something to sell you and here’s why we think you should buy it.”

This approach was advertiser-focused, rather than consumer-focused. Sure, the advertiser would tell you why it would be great for you to have the product, but he didn’t know anything about you. If he didn’t know anything about your wants and needs, how could he really know whether you would buy the product? There was no way to measure the efficacy of each individual pitch or campaign. As a result, advertisers could only get vague ideas about what worked and what didn’t — all it came down to was that some people bought and some people didn’t. That was that.

In the information age, this mindset and methodology changed radically. It was now possible for advertisers to know a lot more about consumers, but it was also possible for consumers to find out a lot more about the products advertisers were selling. The power was now in the consumers’ hands – they could go online, compare brands and features and make an informed decision about what was the best fit for their needs and wants. No more did they have to submit to being “sold to.” Simultaneously, advertisers gained access to more consumer data than ever before, getting hard facts and numbers that told them who was buying what and when.

All of these changes necessitated a new approach — one where the advertiser’s job was to identify a target market’s problem, present a solution and hope the sale would take its course as a result. This required targeting the right people, hence the need for data collection. But the old way of data collection, while better than a shotgun approach, still had the problem of treating people like data points. Marketing campaigns were often based solely on “they bought before, so they must want what we’re selling.” This idea is prone to the same problem as the marketing method of the past — it makes the consumer feel like one of a horde of people being sold to, and most of today’s consumers will not tolerate that.

To deliver a truly personalized experience and execute a consumer-focused approach to selling, advertisers had to learn more about their target audience. They had to know who their target audience was, what they were buying, where they were buying it and what behaviors indicated that they might want to buy. These factors helped advertisers identify the truly motivated buyers who would be the most influenced by marketing strategies. All of this is possible with a data management platform and data exchange method that collects data on a massive scale.

The most evolved marketing strategy you can adopt is one that uses a DMP with a data exchange to create target audiences within your target markets based on up-to-date intelligence. With this information, you can develop personalized product offers to the most motivated buyers across multiple platforms, maximizing the effect of your campaign and creating an experience that your customers won’t forget.

Develop Personalized Product Offers

Lotame’s Commitment to Data Quality

A decade ago, using data to target audiences was a novel concept that marketers and publishers couldn’t get enough of. Today, with so much data at their fingertips, marketers are increasingly focused on data quality. Even if you have years of data stored in your databases, it’s all worth nothing if it’s not accurate, high-quality data. For this very reason, Lotame is taking a stand on the topic of data quality, focusing on providing the highest quality data to our customers.

With high-quality data from Lotame’s data exchange, your business will get these benefits:

Benefits of Data Scale

1. World-Class Targeting

With more accurate audience insights and a removal of all bot and spam data, you get access to information that is all human, representing the true behaviors of your target audiences. This can allow you to make the most intelligent, informed decisions about your campaigns, targeting audiences with razor precision. Read more about our data quality and how we achieve our high standards.

2. More Accurate Insights

With so much emphasis on the impact data can have on campaign performance, targeting and analytics, it is easy to see why the quality of data matters. This is why Lotame has created our brand new Precision Audiences data segments that exceed industry on-target benchmarks and improve targeting, insights, and analytics. First-to-market from this line are our Precision Demographic Audiences, now available in your DSPs. Lotame Precision Audiences are proprietary data segments that have been tested to beat industry benchmarks for accuracy by up to 100%.

3. Reduce Wasted Expenses

With high-quality data, you can target your audience with maximum accuracy, meaning that your ad dollars are going exactly where they need to go to achieve the maximum effect. Say goodbye to the old “spray and pray” method of advertising to everyone and hoping it will stick. Why send messages to an audience who isn’t going to respond, when you can focus your efforts on those most likely to engage.

LDX: Where Quality Meets Scale

Lotame isn’t just focused on quality — we are a leading source for intelligent, accurate and up-to-date data. The Lotame Data Exchange is among the largest exchanges globally. When you use our data exchange, you get immediate access to billions of profiles across the world, including North America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, India and the United Kingdom. All of these profiles, collected from our extensive network of publishers, are delivered with over 50,000 profile attributes and are guaranteed to be highly accurate, so you know that you’re working with the most up-to-date, complete set of data possible. This way, you have everything you need to build strong content, launch successful digital campaigns and create greater audience engagement.

In addition to our quality data, Lotame offers instant access to exclusive co-branded partnerships. Lotame partnered with the most trusted providers to increase transparency. Users of the Lotame data management platform gain access to multiple providers, each of whom provides unique, branded datasets. Our customers can use this data to improve targeting, scale campaigns and increase performance.

On top of all these features, you have the power to customize your audience as you see fit. We provide over 5,000 pre-packaged segments that are ready for targeting. You can add multiple data segments to any audience you are building, or have us build custom segments for you, especially if you are a niche business. No matter what you choose to do, these segments consist of 100 percent declared demographic and demonstrated behavioral data, so you can be sure that the information you’re getting is top quality.

Explore the Ways to Optimize B2C & B2B Data Exchange With Lotame Today

Lotame’s data management platform can help you take full advantage of data exchange methods, whether you are a publisher, advertiser or digital agency. With our data exchange platform, you have the opportunity to truly understand your audiences from the ground up, all while making the most of your time and efforts. Lotame’s third-party data exchange gives you access to billions of data points across the web and throughout the world, giving you a holistic view of your audience and its behaviors with information from social sites, purchasing data, mobile behaviors and more. And best of all? We value your privacy and data protection, so you can trust us never to sell your data without your permission.

Are you interested in getting started? Contact one of Lotame’s customer care representatives to learn more and let’s schedule a time to talk.

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