Brands that will win on digital are using data to drive their decisions and creatives to unlock new ways to engage with their audience.
The post-cookie and ATT world is confusing. Also, the Apple apocalypse affected all the measurements and data regulatory, so marketers are struggling to obtain detailed performance reports.
We’re going to talk about data, why is data important, and why is Hunch focusing on data as one of the pillars behind what we do.
To ease your data struggles, Hunch built a capability to import your feed, transform it and set it up without leaving the Hunch platform and adding a third-party tool.
What data are we dealing with?
When we say data, we're talking about first-party and zero-party data.
Zero-party data is the data that advertisers create themselves, the data that gives structure to the website. From the e-commerce side, that would be your website content like product info, prices, contacts, about page, etc.
Every activity that might involve any operations in your zero-party data can sometimes be a challenge. So, whether it’s running Google shoppable ads, you need some sort of feed, or you want to run Facebook DPAs, you’ll also need a Facebook-compliant feed. Doing so, you’re actually building your zero-party data to power your website, not to power your campaign.
While the first-party data is the data that you’re gathering as an advertiser and actually getting off your website, ie. you’re not using a third-party measurement tool. First-party data informs your campaign on user actions and gives you the capabilities to add strategy and structure to what you’re planning on doing with the campaign elements.
There’s no clean-cut point between 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data.
Why?
Because we're all combining data.
Feed-capability challenges of e-commerce
What we see, especially with big users, is that they want to optimize the load times of their website.
How?
By trying not to bloat the data that's building a website. This means that for each product, they’re going to do the bare minimum adjustments to keep the capability in order to have a functional website. That might mean a smaller image size, less information in the description or only one variant of the product title.
Would it matter if the website didn’t have that structure?
Nope, as long as it stays compatible. And neither the colors of a certain article nor the product type or preference have an effect.
But, most of those fields are required when you’re running a campaign. Google will force users to have product condition data. If you’re using the same feed, you’d need to load all your products on your website.
Say, you need to add five more columns because they're mandatory on Facebook and manage their values. You cannot keep piling data on a feed that isn’t designed to do that.
The challenge is having different data requirements at each touchpoint while using the zero-party data. Each data plays a different role, which puts you in a position where you’d need to manage or add more data to the existing feed. And not by yourself, but with an external ‘administration team’ or a third-party tool.
Don’t pile, enrich your data - Hunch’s Data Management solutions
Big enterprise users often use a third-party data management solution tool for their product feeds. Your data is running on its product feed on which you have the capability to manage operations on thousands of products for different markets and in different languages. Since the campaigns are localized and do the tangible managing themselves, you wouldn’t want to use all that data for every campaign.
It’s a big challenge for the whole market. Every time that you add something new to the stack, it just bloats your feeds. And we figured because the specifics of advertising or such demands are that most of the time, you need more data, the key is that you're trying to enrich your information in some way.
So, what does Hunch solve with its Data Management solutions?
Introducing the Hunch Data Management solutions
With the Hunch Data Management system, we’ve built the capability where a product feed can be imported, transformed and set up in such a way that it’s usable in Facebook and Google campaigns.
More informative product data can be added without leaving the Hunch platform and the need for external management or interference, like 3rd party tools.
How does the Hunch Data Management system plug into what campaigns do and how they use the system?
It might be something as simple as optimizing your conversion campaigns while using the first-part data. The best way to run such a campaign would be to run a product catalog sales campaign, because it gives you the dynamics of a dynamic retargeting campaign.
For example, you can set up a campaign where you target the users that have viewed products, but haven't purchased them, so you create your event-based audience. But, in order for that to work, there has to be an exact match between products on your website and products in the Facebook catalog. And if you don’t have a Facebook-compliant feed, you’re stuck and can’t do proper retargeting.
On the other hand, if your feed is data-clean and Facebook-compliant, you can start managing it and adding creative elements, which is at its core. And of course, your requirements may vary by campaign and your future goals.
The Hunch Feed Management system consists of two main components with their additional features - Feed mapper and Feed extender.
Feed mapper
Feed mapper allows you to remap your feed fields.
For example, in the product list on your website, the column in your field which holds the name of the product is called ‘product name’. But, Facebook’s requirement for a feed to be Facebook-compliant, is that that column is called ‘title’. Feed mapper allows you to remap the ‘product name’ column into ‘title’ and make it Facebook-compliant.
Or, if you’re missing a field, you can add it through the Feed mapper. Facebook requires information about the product condition. Since the condition of your product is new, you don’t have that data in the feed, yet. Feed mapper allows you to simply add the field ‘condition’ with its new value.
Feed mapper also holds all the verticals in Facebook catalogs and does the QA of your data.
You’ll easily see what data you’re missing, what’s the mandatory data, recommended data or required values. It'll do a pre-flight through your feed, to flag items that are not aligned with Facebook’s rules.
Feed mapper helps you remap the feed and assign individual values where needed or if they’re missing. The importance of that is the requirements for your website or whatever system you're using may or may not be aligned with Facebook’s requirements. But now, you can easily remap your feed, all by yourself.
Feed extender
While Feed mapper lets you manipulate the existing data in the feed, the Feed extender lets you add new data to it, allowing you to choose where the data is going to be added and how.
For example, a multi-brand sporting goods store wants to add a specific lifestyle image for all the products of a specific brand. One way to do that would require an external source or administrator to manage it. With the Hunch Feed extender, you can simply do it yourself. It also gives the ability to upload needed assets.
Why is Feed extender important for optimization?
Obviously, getting your feed to be Facebook-compliant. Also, you can add as much data as you want to your feed, so you can keep adding data that’s going to be used in creative, affecting your positive performance.
For instance, user reviews are an excellent way to draw attention to your products. In Facebook catalogs, a field for reviews doesn’t exist, but Hunch allows you to import them through Feed extender and use them in creative to get better performance.
What problems does the Feed Management system solve?
All users that have a need to be involved with their feed, in any way, are now Facebook-ready by just plugging into Hunch. It solves the problem of feed compatibility, so you no longer have to worry if the feed is Facebook-compatible. Also, you can manipulate your data much faster, better, all by yourself, without needing an external administrative team to do that for you.
What would happen without the Feed Management solutions in our system?
Any users that don’t have a Facebook-compliant feed face the challenge of running successful campaigns.
The problem is that creating and updating ad content is a lot of work. When using feed-based ads this is all automated.
Within our system, the challenge we saw often is that users need to update their feed when they start using the system. On the other hand, they wouldn't be able to start using the system straight away, because in order to run Facebook campaigns, they’d need to organize their feed first.
So we built a solution for them.
Who should use the Hunch Feed Management solution?
First and foremost are direct performance advertisers, brands that are independently managing their e-commerce data. There are also performance agencies working with multiple brands, because performance agencies as well, face the challenge of the brand not being ready feed-side, which would require a lot of manual work or introducing some third-party software.
With the Feed Management system, users can easily gloss over these problems, and actually manage their data with ease through Hunch.
Try it out for yourself or contact your dedicated Customer Success Manager if you need any help with it.
