• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 24, 2015

engage:BDR has formed a partnership with Neustar that will allow advertisers to reach 97.2% of adult American Internet users by targeting advertising more accurately through offline data, connecting audience data pools through a real-time bidding programmatic platform.

The deal gives the companies access to about 16,000 consumer attributes and profiles.

Verified offline data from hundreds of sources identify and segment consumers by brand preferences, product affinities, psychographic variables and demographic data including data across key categories like apparel, computers and electronics, dining, financial services, grocery, lifestyles, media consumption habits and mobile device ownership.

Translating numbers into results, Ted Dhanik, engage:BDR CEO, tested a similar system by buying a mailing list in four ZIP codes whose single-family homes assess at a minimum of $1.5 million to $1.75 million. Rather than create a physical mailing list of several thousand addresses, Dhanik asked Neustar and other data firms to match the street addresses with IP addresses and online cookies. He fed the data into engage:BDR's platform.

Display impressions reached 15,761,204 on 85,220 clicks at a cost of $35,465.23, about $0.42 cost per visit. Compare that with physical mail, about 7,040 pieces that drove 47 visits to the Web site at a cost of $14,080, costing about $299.57 per each visit. The ads ran on Realtor, Trulia, Curbed, and Homes, among other sites.

Offline data has become very relevant for online targeting. In another test integrating offline data, the average click-through rate (CTR) on display ads came in at more than 1% on some pieces of content, while others came in at about .5%. The average is less than .1%, he said.