• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 18, 2016

Connexity furthered its strategy this week to build targeted audience segments and tie-in offline brand preference data from Simmons Research, launching what CEO Bill Glass calls an "enhanced" version of AudienceView.

Announced this week, AudienceView combines online behavior data collected from Hitwise with thousands of survey-based audience attributes from Simmons Research before taking the data through a programmatic platform to deliver on campaigns. Rather than taking off-the-shelf segments, marketers can search a database to find consumers who have searched on specific terms or visited specific Web sites or purchased specific products in a store.

While audience segments and messages continue to become increasingly targeted, Glass says marketers need to pay close attention to the size of the panel.

The result creates a view of where people go online, who they are, and what they like from a panel of nearly 10 million U.S. consumers, including about 3.5 million mobile devices, across 20 million Web sites and 500 million search terms monthly. This enables clients to define and then find audiences based on search intent, frequency of action, and other types of behavior.

A panel of 10 million U.S. consumers still allows advertisers to reach a specific set of consumers without feeling as if the number of customers in the group dwindled to nothing. "You lose the benefit if the panel is small, because no one wants to market to 100 people," he says.

The targeting means connecting Web site data with search activity across desktop and mobile, as well as tying in purchase behavior and customer attributes like demographics, psychographics, media consumption and brand loyalty.

Marketers can define segments based on Web site category level pages, transaction site sections, frequency of visitation and product specific searches. Research teams have the ability to report separately and trend the specific mobile behaviors of their customers across search and clickstream data.

The companies will continue to improve the ability to segment audiences and connect that data with market research, Glass said.