Many marketers are still sulking over the removal of Partner Categories, Facebook’s third-party data exchange. And that’s understandable. Many advertisers had come to rely on Partner
Categories as a means of targeting their media buys on Facebook. For these advertisers, the path to finding audiences on the platform has entirely changed course.
Despite their
frustrations, few advertisers are likely to walk away from advertising on Facebook in light of the unpopular move. Facebook still exists as a gateway to large, valuable swaths of engaged consumers. So
how can marketers who continue to invest in Facebook reach their audiences?
Third-Party Data Still Rules the Day
Facebook will still allow advertisers
to target their first-party audiences on campaigns via a CRM upload, and many industry headlines to date put an emphasis on first-party data as a go-forward strategy. But let’s face it:
Third-party data is still the bread and butter of advertising, especially when it comes to new-customer acquisition. A first-party strategy simply won’t achieve the results needed by many of
today’s Facebook advertisers.
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Marketers of all stripes and across business categories use primarily third-party data to get in front of new potential customers, and
prospecting represents the lion's share of marketing spend. For some marketers, such as those in the entertainment space, this is especially the case. According to Donnie Williams, chief digital
officer at Horizon Media, studios often don’t have much first-party data available. It simply isn’t a priority for them.
The removal of Partner Categories is
particularly problematic in a highly anticipated election year. Brands, agencies and especially marketers behind political campaigns are going to have to fundamentally rethink how they reach their
audiences across the globe.
The Future of Third-Party Data Relationships
With the recent changes at Facebook, today’s marketers face a complex
web of challenges when it comes to targeting their audiences on the world’s most popular social media platform. Given the importance of prospecting and the shortcomings of most
advertisers’ first-party data assets, it’s clear that third-party data is still a must-have for the modern marketer. Therefore, in rethinking their approaches to advertising on Facebook,
marketers must also rethink how they partner with third-party data providers.
Going forward, brands and agencies must seek to build one-to-one partnerships with third-party
data providers that can help solve their Facebook advertising woes. Likewise, these partners must rise to the challenge of restoring the ease of using their data within the platform.
At present, getting third-party data into Facebook can be time-consuming. In general, marketers can request an audience segment to be built and activated by their data providers into Facebook
via an onboarding partner. However, this process can take up to two weeks, stalling the launch of campaigns while also diminishing the match rates of the audience. Having previously been spoiled by
the ease of creating audiences within seconds using Partner Categories, this new process is far from ideal for marketers.
By establishing stronger relationships with data
providers, marketers can not only reinstate the ease of Facebook advertising to which they’ve become accustomed, but they can also open up deeper targeting capabilities for their campaigns.
While Facebook’s Partner Categories offered demographic and behavioral data such as lifestyle traits, interests and purchase behaviors, its segments came up wanting in terms of deeper consumer
motivations that can be revealed via psychographic data. Now that brands and agencies are getting more hands-on with their Facebook targeting data, they can seek to fill in the gaps that Facebook left
open with its own offering.
Without a doubt, the removal of Partner Categories by Facebook has serious implications for advertisers on the platform, but it’s not the end of
the line. This shift represents an opportunity for marketers to get more deeply involved with their data partners in order to better leverage third-party data not only on Facebook, but also across the
entirety of their media buys.