What is LiveRamp?
LiveRamp is a data management platform that connects you with data providers who can provide various data insights about the people in your audience to enable people-based targeting.
This makes it possible for publishers to earn higher CPM rates, improve CTR rates and utilize their inventory more efficiently by very precisely targeting premium campaigns to interested visitors.
What's really exciting about this is that the LiveRamp platform gives you access to over 35,000 interest-based data segments from more than 40 data providers. Does your advertiser want to reach visitors who are interested in kid's clothing? No problem. How about visitors who drive a BMW? You got it. Maybe you want to target households with an income between $100,000 - $149,999? Again, no problem. The possibilities are almost endless and you can get even more precise by combining other types of targeting such as geographic targeting.
The Data Providers
Here are some of the data providers that LiveRamp is able to connect you with:
Getting Started
The first step is to click on the Settings icon in the AdvertServe tool bar.
Then click on Segments > Listing in the left menu. Segments represent data points. For example, all visitors that are interested in cooking would be a data segment.
You should now see a big, green button that says BROWSE LIVERAMP DATA STORE -- click on it.
What you will see next is a list of data providers on the LiveRamp platform.
You can click on any of the data providers to browse through their segments, but using the search tool to find what you need is much faster so go ahead and click on the SEARCH ALL PROVIDERS button.
In the screen shot above you can see I'm going to search for bombora technology, which should return to me all of the technology related segments provided by Bombora and sure enough it does as you can see in the following screen shot.
As you can see each segment has a name and a CPM rate. Let us talk about the CPM rate real quick. Purchasing data from LiveRamp does not cost anything up front. Rather you pay for using the data, so if you use a segment that costs $1.00 CPM to target a campaign for 10,000 impressions you would owe $10 for that data usage. The great thing about our partnership with LiveRamp is that these data usage fees will simply be added to your monthly AdvertServe invoice. This saves you the time and hassle of working out payments with dozens of providers.
You can also click on the little info icon next to each segments name to view more detail on it:
Purchasing data segments is easy. You just check the box on their line item and press the Purchase Selected Segments button.
At this point is when the real magic happens behind the scenes. We submit a data subscription request to LiveRamp and normally within 24-48 hours they start sending us the requested data for cookie-matched users in your audience. Due to the way it works, it is generally a good idea to purchase segments you need for a campaign prior to the campaign starting. This way we can "prime" your cookie pool with as many users as possible ahead of time. Remember, there is no up front charge for purchasing segments.
The final step is actually setting up a campaign to target the data segment you purchased. This is actually the easiest part. Keep in mind that campaigns may be created using segments immediately after they are purchased, however, they will not start running until the data pipeline starts flowing. Again, it is a good idea to purchase the data segment(s) at least a few days before your campaign starts!
As you can see above, the screen shot from the campaign wizard shows that all you need to do is click on Visitor Retargeting and select the segment you wish to target. Optionally you can change the rules for the attribution window. What that means is you can choose to target only users that have been cookied with a segment within a specified time range. However, that is more typically done with in-house retargeting data and should generally be set without restriction with LiveRamp provided data.
Final Thoughts
LiveRamp is amazing and we are so excited to introduce it into the AdvertServe platform. Advertisers are willing to pay a premium for people-based targeting and you can expect to see higher CTR's and more optimal use of inventory. Keep in mind that you can also pair people-based targeting with geographic targeting for even better results!
Mike Cherichetti
