Real-time events can impact the outcomes of your advertising efforts. The ability to activate real-time data is playing an increasingly valuable role in digital advertising. By integrating live data into your strategies and campaigns, you can dynamically adjust your efforts to optimize results.
"What we have found is that, unless you're able to act on data in real time, it becomes irrelevant,” said Heather Chevalley, VP of Growth at Fluency during a session at Advertising Week New York 2024.
In this article, we’ll share some insightful ways that you can use real-time data to make your advertising campaigns more effective, strategic, and easier to execute.
What does “real-time data” mean in advertising?
There are a lot of different types of data in advertising: performance data, audience data, CRM customer data…the list could truly go on and on.
This article focuses on the usage of real-time data in advertising strategies and operational workflows. But what does “real-time data” mean? Real-time data means that the data set is constantly updated and available for use in real-time decisions or usage.
Watch now: building data-driven campaigns with automation
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, consumers expect personalized and relevant ads that cater to their interests and needs. Real-time data allows you to better understand your target audience’s behavior and preferences in the moment, allowing you to tailor ads accordingly. Activating real-time data in your ad campaigns leads to higher engagement rates, better conversion rates, and, ultimately, a more successful outcome for your clients.
Types of real-time data in digital advertising
Some types of real-time data that apply to advertisers include:
Examples of real-time internal data:
- Inventory levels
- Occupancy or lease rates
- Ticketing data
- Pricing changes
- Promotions or special offers
- Appointment availability
- Wait times
Examples of real-time external data:
- Conversion rates
- Use location data from mobile devices
- Device type
- Weather data
- Browsing behavior or recent history
- Trending keywords
- Local event schedules
- Search volume trends
- Ad impression share
- Engaged user demographics
Getting started with real-time data
It can be hard to know where to begin if you’re just starting to use data in your advertising campaigns and strategies. Overthinking about the steps or workflows required to execute data-powered campaigns on a technical level may discourage you from exploring what’s possible.
Instead, take a step back from the tactical requirements. Ask yourself this:
If you could use any data set for your strategic decisions or to generate ads, what data would you use?
Focus on what real-time data would be most valuable for you to act upon for a specific client (or even within your wider organization). We call this the “dream data state.”
Your “dream data state” could include first-party data, like ticketing or lease inventory data. You could even include real-time data sets that are widely available. For example, weather data would be valuable for event advertisers or outdoor tourism companies.
With a fully integrated Digital Advertising Operating System like Fluency, you can integrate and utilize any data set you want. Let us handle that. Instead, focus on what you want to build or achieve. That’s the easiest way to build data-powered advertising strategies and realize what’s possible with your data.
Automate decision trees for smarter, more cost-effective ad delivery
When you’re reviewing performance metrics for different assets, ad sets, keywords, campaigns, or channels, you know the right actions to take to continuously optimize for targets. For instance, you know when to turn off an underperforming keyword or when to add budget to an ad set that’s outperforming others on a given channel.
What if you didn’t have to put the time and effort into executing these strategic decisions? Integrating real-time data into automation rules enables you to automate these actions at scale across your entire portfolio.
What does this look like in practice?
“Let’s say you're selling tickets and the event is 95% sold out,” said Chevalley. “You may want to turn that advertising off. On the other hand, if you're an events company and you have an outdoor event coming up, you can look at the weather leading up to the event. Determining if it’s going be a rainout or not could impact your budgeting decisions.”
Automating these on/off campaign decisions means your team can focus on other high-value tasks without babysitting campaigns and looking for specific thresholds. When certain conditions arise, actions are instantly made based on what you would typically do. These actions can be within specific campaigns or ad sets, but they can also extend across channels. Working in this way also ensures that you’re not overspending on campaigns that are going to hit their goals (or that hit a goal after hours or over the weekend when you’re offline).
As your team continues to grow and take on more responsibilities, it's important to find ways to streamline processes and make the most of your time. Building automated decision trees with real-time data means your agency can quickly adjust to changing circumstances, 24/7. With automated campaign decisions, you can trust that your marketing efforts are being optimized without the need for constant monitoring.
Deliver dynamic content customization at scale using real-time triggers
Automation gives you the ability to harness real-time data from multiple sources to create personalized ad campaigns that instantly adapt to shopper behavior. Delivering dynamic, contextually relevant ads at scale gives your agency the unique capacity to drive deeper engagement for your customers without being weighted down by cumbersome workflows.
Picture this: you’re running campaigns for an outdoor apparel company. Your customer has given you access to their live site data as well as their CRM database. Knowing that weather is an important part of your customer’s product seasonality, you’ve also synced in live weather data from key shopper regions.
A shopper adds a winter jacket to their cart on the outdoor apparel company’s e-commerce site but doesn’t complete the purchase. This abandoned cart action triggers a series of automated steps within your advertising operating system.
The system pulls in data from the abandoned cart, like the product name, photo, and description. These data points, combined with the abandoned cart site data, can be used to create a tailored ad—complete with a product image, price, and description—aimed at recapturing that shopper’s attention in real time.
You could also utilize live inventory levels to determine if urgency can be used to drive a faster response from the shopper. For instance, when stock is low, the ad might display, “Still thinking about the K2 Explorer Jacket? Only 10 left—order now!”
Weather data can also be used for geographic customization. If the shopper’s location is expecting snow, the message could say something like, “Snow is in the forecast—stay warm with the K2 Explorer Jacket!”
Pulling off this level of dynamic customization is impossible at scale using manual processes and workflows. By the time you’ve set up the necessary logic to run the abandoned cart campaign (if you even can set it up), the window of opportunity has passed.
Digital Advertising Operating Systems like Fluency automate every aspect of this process. These robust automation tools dynamically generate copy and visuals. Plus, using automation ensures that even custom ads stay relevant and timely without any manual intervention. When inventory changes or weather conditions shift, the messaging adjusts instantly.
Most importantly, these tools automate this strategic capacity at scale. The system can replicate this personalized approach for every instance, whether it’s a winter jacket or a bathing suit, applying these dynamic updates across all campaigns simultaneously. Bulk updates ensure each ad feels uniquely tailored but is deployed seamlessly across the entire customer base.
Using these tools enables your agency to drive compelling, personalized campaigns that are delivered quickly and effortlessly across your customer’s entire funnel. Plus, by assigning the execution of these campaigns to automated tools, your team has more time to put into strategic conversations with your customers or testing opportunities.
Expedite performance optimization with real-time publisher data and AI
External data sources, such as campaign or asset performance data, can also be utilized by automation tools to inform strategic decision-making. This also ensures that you’re automatically delivering the most impactful campaigns possible.
Let’s say you’re working with a donut shop franchise. The customer has a limited advertising budget. As such, they want your agency to ensure that every ad you’re running generates a specific number of leads. Your team is responsible for evaluating campaign performance and making adjustments (less budget, more budget, new creative) based on whether or not campaigns are meeting these requirements.
Reviewing lead generation data on each platform and taking the necessary optimization steps takes time. This is especially true when you multiply these workflows—manually turning off underperforming campaigns, moving budget between channels, or swapping in new images for testing—across every campaign on every channel.
And, let’s be honest: most days, you don’t have that kind of time to dedicate to just one customer account.
Instead of doing all these tasks manually, you can use automation tools to set performance thresholds for each campaign across every channel. These automated solutions can monitor real-time lead data coming in from each channel, then toggle different campaigns on or off depending on whether it’s delivering the required results.
Fully integrated systems like Fluency can even use AI to evaluate what’s working well on one channel and propose recommendations (keywords, negative keywords, targeting changes) that can be implemented on other channels. This empowers you to automate performance optimizations for any underperforming campaigns.
Pairing real-time performance data with automation ensures that campaigns align with your customer’s goals, budgets, or KPIs. These tools ensure that your team is technically delivering on what you say you’re going to do without doing a lot of manual work to achieve those expectations. That’s crucial if you want to remain competitive and keep customers from churning.
The addition of AI into this data-driven workflow means performance can continuously improve and evolve, constantly adapting to changes in the market and consumer behavior. Essentially, you can keep delivering better and better advertising outcomes for customers without any manual work.
Start elevating your ad strategies with real-time data
We’ve outlined a lot of ideas here for using real-time data in advertising. The truth is that there are limitless possibilities for the kinds of data you can use to build, automate, and optimize your ad campaigns.
The best place to start is with your “data dream state.” Think about what kinds of real-time data would be the most valuable for your team to act upon.
This could include first-party data, like the ticketing example shared here. Maybe you want to use external performance data directly from publishers to cross-reference which channels deliver the best results for specific clients.
Whatever your data dreams are, you can bring them to life with automation. Reach out to our team and share your vision so we can help you make it a reality.
