As a PPC expert or someone responsible for digital acquisition - are you clinging onto the last vestiges of third-party cookies – or have you joined the race to discover new targeting solutions to optimise your advertising campaigns like so many others? 

Whichever approach to our cookie-less future you have adopted, the good news is you won’t be alone. 

The Solution

In the ever-changing realm of digital marketing, a game-changing evolution has emerged– the fusion of CRM and PPC advertising. This new symbiosis of 2 previously exclusive disciplines, can transform leads into conversions, tailor messages to customer specific preferences and improve customer experience.

“CRM Advertising” is a digital marketing paradigm shift that harnesses CRM data to radically optimise PPC.

Fusing the breadth, quality and insight of your CRM data (zero and first party data) and your PPC advertising know how is the ideal replacement for third party cookies and deliver campaigns that capture attention and lead to conversions whilst increasing customer value and success.

Just to be clear:

Zero party data is knowingly given by a person such as name, address, email address, preference centre data etc. It doesn't require analysis and offers insights directly from customers.

First party data is derived from tracked behaviour such as web activity, transactions and content engagement and requires analysis to derive insights.

So CRM data provides both customer identity and customer insights. It is the data that the company owns and controls, typically gathered through its own website, apps, email activity and offline interactions.

The benefits of CRM Advertising

There are many ways CRM data can improve your PPC campaigns, including the following:

1.     Audience Augmentation - Adding specific audiences to your campaigns using segmented CRM data to improve ads and increase conversion on PPC campaigns.

2.     Lead Optimisation - Help you understand where your high-quality leads are coming from and optimise more towards them.  Understand where your poor-quality leads are coming hence showing you the areas in which you need to improve.

3.     LTV Management - Getting to a customer value level with leads, shows that the metrics reported in Google Analytics don't provide the full picture. By utilising CRM data and understanding your customers’ LTV (Lifetime Value) you can effectively manage your advertising budget to its full potential.



4.     Exclusion - Excluding existing customers through CRM data from you PPC campaigns can ensure you are not wasting media spend recruiting customers you already have. You can communicate with existing customers through less expensive ‘owned’ media channels such as email marketing.

Whilst many companies prioritise obtaining the maximum number of leads at the lowest cost using CPA optimisation, conversion tracking through CRM fusion offers a more advanced approach that delves deeper than mere cost-per-lead optimisation, allowing you to identify which keywords or campaigns most often result in actual customers rather than just leads and with a little bit of extra CRM know how – you can start to target by LTV or ROI.

So, wake up all you CRM peeps – now is the time to renew your relationships with your marketing acquisition and paid media teams – to help then tap into the rich seems of customer data & insights you have been meticulously building. Because now more than ever - your audience segmentation whether it be based on loyalty, products or browsing behaviours can be used to optimise your digital acquisition programmes.

Organisational Silo’s

Of course, CRM Advertising sounds like a no brainer – but as usual there is a catch. For whatever reason – we tend to sit in organisational silo’s – where teams are galvanized around a common theme – be that purpose or discipline. These teams are made up of industry experts who have a range of very specific language and approaches to using customer insight, building data and measurements which serve their specific objectives.

Acquisition teams talk reach, target markets & conversions and build lookalike audiences out of insights gleaned from browser sessions, purchase history or buyer profiles. Whilst the CRM team talk engagement, build segments based on attitude or behaviour overlaid with RFV or LTV to establish overall value to the business and campaigns that deliver relevance to their audiences.

To rise to the challenges of a third party cookie-less future – where CRM data (zero and first party) becomes the lifeblood of successful digital acquisition programmes - we will need to harmonize our data assets. We will need to use common approaches to measurement, data segmentation and insights that can be used for consistent and better targeting of both CRM and PPC campaigns.

CRM advertising is only as good as the data you use to define your most attractive audiences – so the smarter and better you can get at harnessing the power of your data to deliver more relevant and targeted PPC campaigns the more bang for your buck you will get. Not just in terms of CPA but LTV and total marketing ROI as well.