Proving the impact of Buying Group targeting on ad campaign performance

Buying Groups are a collection of personas that come together to make purchasing decisions. They are used across various places on the Demandbase One platform to support Marketing and Sales via orchestration, in Ads, etc. Measuring the causal impact of targeting Buying Groups in all these contexts can be challenging. However, we can do it effectively in the context of ads campaign performance, using an advanced difference-in-differences approach.

We found that Demandbase’s Buying Groups Targeting used in ad campaigns is a highly effective strategy for driving improvements to campaign performance. However, as of today only ~26% of ad campaigns take advantage of this ad targeting strategy. We recommend marketers consider taking advantage of this functionality more often.

Additionally, setting up Buying Groups used to be a manual, tedious, and time consuming task. Our AI Buying Groups Setup Agent automatically sets up Buying Groups on behalf of our Demandbase customers, which enables them to easily add this as targeting to their ad campaigns. One customer said “We spent a month setting up personas manually. Now it’s done for us.”

Why focus on Buying Groups

In addition to being key decision makers, the table below shows that Buying Group members are a highly valuable and responsive audience segment. Their engagement is only surpassed  by the re-targeted audiences, which are already actively engaging with the advertiser.

Compared to Non-Buying Group and Non-Re-Targeted users, Buying Group members have:

1. 77.64% higher visit rate – signalling responsiveness to the right messaging
2. 26.10% more web pages viewed – signalling exploration/higher interest

Impact on ad campaign performance

We isolated the causal impact of adding Buying Group Targeting to ad campaigns and found statistically significant improvements to campaign performance:

• +26% improvement in campaign’s daily visit rate (# visits / # impressions)
• -17% decrease in cost per visit (spend / # visits)
• +19.7% improvement in unique accounts reached per impression
• CPM (cost per mille) and CTR (click-through rate) did not change significantly.

Adding Buying Groups targeting to online ad campaigns significantly increases the user visit rate and unique account reach, while significantly reducing cost per visit. The Buying Group Setup Agent is described here, which enables adding Buying Group targeting to ad campaigns for tenants who have not yet set up Buying Groups.