It has been difficult so far to assess the efficiency of online advertising to drive offline purchases. In the absence of precise tools, advertisers and agencies can rely only on conventional online metrics such as click-through-rate, which do not tell much about what happens after the users left their screens.
Segmento, a programmatic platform based in Moscow with a data science and software development branch in Saint-Petersburg, has developed a new approach to address the issue. Based on sophisticated data-analysis and machine-learning techniques, the solution uses depersonalized Big Data related to the transactions made by anonymized consumers in the offline world.
Based on this data, Segmento’s programmatic platform [which buys online ads in real-time bidding auctions] can determine whether the group of users who watched a banner or video ad and the group of those who are making a purchase in a shop are, or not, the same persons.
“Measuring the cause-and-effect relationship between online advertising and offline purchasing became possible thanks to programmatic buying, machine learning and linking cookies to their offline behavior,” says Roman Nester, Segmento’s co-founder and CEO.
“For example, the Sales Lift indicator compares two groups of online targeted users – those who are exposed to ads and are not. Then we find out the up lift of purchases thanks to our Ad in comparison with those purchases that would be made anyway,” he explains.
Online-offline matching for DIY retail chain
One of the first companies to use the Segmento solution is OBI, a leading player in the Russian DIY (Do It Yourself) segment. OBI used the Segmento Technology in April and May this year, a high season period before the summer.
“By matching online and offline data, this technology has allowed us, for the first time, to evaluate the impact of specific digital channel on offline sales with a high degree of certainty. The main performance indicator to estimate the efficiency of advertising campaign is Sales Lift, which reaches 21%. It means that Segmento ad watchers made 21% more offline purchases than those who haven’t watched the ads,” says Daniil Shcherbakov, Digital Media Planner at OBI.
Segmento is not the only available technology to track offline-to-online. Acxiom’s LiveRamp and Lotame in USA, Experian in Ireland also make it possible, collecting Big Data from retail transactions, call centers and CRM and loyalty programs, and taking it online for ad planning, targeting and campaign measurement.
However, they do not measure the post-campaign results in in-store purchases – which Segmento does.
A startup backed by behemots
Segmento was founded in 2012 by Roman Nester, Eugeny Legkiy and Kirill Safonov under the Rutarget brand. Now a joint venture of Sberbank, a huge Russian bank, and Sistema VC, the venture arm of a large conglomerate, Segmento has grown into a 135-employee company.
It is connected to leading publishers and works with advertisers directly (40%) and through local and international advertising agencies and groups (60%). Among the clients are Danone, Mastercard, Stada, Pfizer, L’Oréal, Estee Lauder, Huawei, Bayer. Segmento’s main partners are world leading communication groups BBDO Group, ADV, OMD OM Group, Media Direction Group, Dentsu Aegis Network, Publicis Media.
The company claims that its platform can process more than 2 billion events including bid requests, ads displays, clicks, sessions, conversions, purchases per day.
Sberbank, the national savings bank, acquired a stake in the company in 2015. Its stated goal was to use depersonalized data from clients (some 84 million at that time) and their online behavioral data in order to deliver advertising of TOP 1000 Russian and international advertisers in real time via a variety of channels. This collaboration between Sberbank and Segmento was presented as “the first example of large-scale monetization of banking data in Russia and Europe.”
In late 2016, Segmento was the cornerstone of a “strategic agreement” between Sberbank and Sistema VC, which acquired a 50% stake in Segmento.
The startup’s Big Data monetization capacity was to be applied to the data generated by companies affiliated to the Sistema group, in a bid to create the “national leader in digital advertising sales and joint monetization of depersonalized Big Data.” Thus, Segmento cooperates with MTS, a leading mobile operator, with new applications planned for 2019, Nester tells us.
