Consumer Insights, Simply Sourced: Leveraging Mobile Advertiser IDs (MAIDs)

Consumers overwhelmingly expect personalized experiences. McKinsey research found that 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. And 76 percent get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.¹ Plus, personalization is growing in importance across multiple generations: 45 percent of Millennials and 31 percent of Gen Z consider personalized retail offers very or extremely important. Additionally, 41 percent of Millennials and 34 percent of Gen Z shoppers say it is very or extremely likely they would switch merchants based on more personalized offers, according to PYMENTS Intelligence data.²

The rewards can be great: personalized marketing can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent, lift revenues by up to 15 percent, and increase marketing ROI by as much as 30 percent, according to McKinsey.³

This now-established attitude presents a growing necessity 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 and profile information 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.

Related White Paper: Why the Mobile Advertiser ID is Critical to Building a Persistent Consumer Identity

See how our data can help you better know your audience. 

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.

There has been a lot of discussion around the demise of cookies and the impact on other types of identifiers, but many of the doom and gloom scenarios have not come to pass. While the future of MAIDs is uncertain, there is no doubt that they can provide great value now. 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 customer's 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.

Ready to use Mobilewalla's Data to better know your audience?

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

See how our data can help you better know your audience.

Sources:

¹ https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-personalization 

² https://www.pymnts.com/consumer-insights/2024/millennials-value-personalized-offers-the-most/ 

³ https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-personalization  

This blog post updates one originally posted in April 2020.