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Using First-Party Data for Marketing

There are many kinds of data you can put to work through various promotion channels as an affiliate marketer, but on some level, they all fall into one of three groups:

  • First-party data – every piece of information you’ve gathered yourself through your website, email marketing campaigns or other channels.
  • Second-party data – information collected by your partners that’s available to you upon request; this includes data from AdWords and Facebook ads.
  • Third-party data – everything that you’ve bought or obtained in some other way from an independent company that’s not your partner.

In all honesty, each of the above is every usable and each can be worth your dollar, however, it’s your first-party data that’s often the most valuable.

Here’s how to use it:

Remarketing in AdWords

Even though AdWords is your partner, the data we’re dealing with here can still be considered as first-party.

AdWords allows you to create custom audiences based on people’s activity on your site. So it’s actually your own data, and Google is only the platform that enables collecting it. We described the process a couple of days ago (how to remarket to existing players).

With this data, you can market to users who have converted on your site, who have viewed more than X pages, or take many other factors into account. It’s all about how you can process the data before going back to AdWords with it.

Custom Audiences on Facebook

Facebook advertising allows you to import a custom audience and then use it as the target group for a Facebook ad campaign.

The best part about it is that Facebook can process data in many different formats. For example, you can deliver a list of Facebook IDs, or even a list of email addresses of people on your list.

Facebook will take it and translate it to actual user accounts. On top of that, there’s also the option of “lookalike audiences,” in which Facebook takes your original list and creates a similar list based on your audience’s common traits.

Landing Page Optimization

One of the best ways to grow your profits without investing anything in new traffic, or looking for new affiliate programs is to improve your landing pages.

And there’s literally no other better way to do that than to look at the data you already have – regarding the way people interact with your current landing page – and then build upon it.

For starters, you can look into the common traits of people who have converted vs. the ones who haven’t. Why isn’t your landing page resonating with them?