The Ultimate Publisher’s Guide to Customer Data Platforms (CDP)

Is it time to take advantage of all that a CDP has to offer your business? With third-party cookie deprecation looming and heightened customer expectations for their privacy as they browse the web, zero-party and first-party data are quickly becoming one of the most pressing sources of information that media and publishing companies are working to leverage. For many of these companies, collecting this data hasn’t been an issue — it’s been activating it in a meaningful way that’s been a challenge.

To do anything with zero-party or first-party data required large support teams and infrastructure for decades. Publishers would need to hire teams of data scientists, analysts, and marketers and dedicate hours of development to cleanse and standardize the data they collected and use it for segmentation, personalization, and other common use cases.

More recently, software platforms have entered the space to reduce the overhead of many of these initiatives. With customer data platforms (CDPs), publishers are able to integrate, segment, personalize, and more at scale with far less complexity than in the past.

Here, we’ll take a closer look at what a CDP is, what it offers to publishers of all shapes and sizes, and what you should expect from your CDP as a media company.

What is a CDP?

There are several variations of how customer data platforms describe their products, but the most basic definition of a CDP is “a software tool that collects and aggregates customer data from various sources to create a unified customer database”. There are three main elements that the CDP Institute defines as core to a CDP:

A CDP is packaged software.

One of the primary benefits of a CDP over other data products like data warehouses or data lakes is that the CDP is a complete product that is purchased or licensed by business users such as marketers. There’s usually minimal involvement from an IT/engineering perspective to implement or maintain a CDP.

Many publishers choose to use CDPs because of this.

By choosing a packaged software, they’re able to leverage technical resources provided by the vendor or agencies to implement the software and make changes/additions to the product over time. Business stakeholders like marketers can then focus on what they want their CDP to do rather than the methods required to do it.

A CDP has a persistent, unified customer database.

Most marketing technology used by publishers today already has a customer database component to it, but many make it difficult to connect their database to that of any other system.

CDPs handle this problem by creating a comprehensive view of each customer. They collect data from multiple sources, link the information to individual customer profiles, and then store the linked information along with newly collected information like customer behaviors over time.

To activate the data that’s been linked and collected, a CDP must contain personal identifiers for each individual that can be used to target messaging and analyze results.

While CDPs can work with anonymous data collected from web activities, they generally depend on publisher’s existing data to help identify individuals more quickly and accurately. This is often done through integrations with email service providers, subscription management systems, and other platforms that contain customer databases with personally identifiable information.

When evaluating a CDP, it’s important to understand how data is collected and unified. Are they collecting anonymous data when an anonymous user consents to data collection? How long do you store anonymous data? If an anonymous user takes an identifying action (such as submitting a web form), do you link all historical data to that individual? And how long does it take for you to link that anonymous data to the individual if there’s already a customer profile created from another source?

A CDP must be accessible to other systems.

In order to take advantage of the many benefits a CDP has to offer, the data stored within the CDP must be available for use in other systems where an end user may wish to activate or analyze the data.

A CDP generally has the role of collecting, aggregating and restructuring data from external sources. Then, it adds calculated fields like model scoring to customer profiles. These calculated fields (or at least the segments of users who match some criteria around these fields) need to be accessible to other systems.

Commonly, external systems will interact with CDP data through the use of direct integrations, APIs, database queries, and/or file extracts.

What a CDP is not.

• A CDP is not a platform that depends primarily on its own data. This is more common for a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), or Email Service Provider (ESP).
• A CDP is not a platform that stores limited data for limited periods of time. They’re designed to perform more effectively with larger datasets for training, modeling, and segmentation.
• A CDP is not a platform that depends heavily on externally-owned, second-party or third-party data. This is more common for a Data Management Platform (DMP).

Levels of CDP Sophistication

Because the CDP space is still relatively new, the features and functionality of each CDP can vary widely. We’ll outline some common benchmarks here to determine how sophisticated a CDP is.

Keep in mind that not all publishers need an ultra-sophisticated CDP. Your company may be benefit from a less sophisticated option that meets all of your business goals. Alternatively, if it integrates directly with a platform that more sophisticated CDPs don’t support out of the box, that option may better suit your needs.

The best CDP for your media company will be the one that is the most compatible with your tech stack. It should also support your vision for where that tech stack needs to go in the future.

Level 1: Data Aggregation

The most basic CDP platform should be able to receive data from your company’s data sources. It should be able to link that data to customer profiles. Then, it needs to store those profiles in a database that you can then access from other systems.

This is the basic definition of a CDP outlined in the previous section.

Level 2: Analytics & Insights

In addition to data collection, CDPs should have some analytics features as they progress to a more sophisticated state. The types of analytics features available can range broadly from database analytics (aggregated metrics) to querying/segmentation, to machine learning and predictive AI.

Level 3: Campaign Delivery

With segmentation and targeting covered in the analytics stage, many CDPs allow marketers to create and deploy the personalizations associated with those targets. These can be everything from content recommendations as customers browse your site to real-time offers and messaging based on user interactions.

Some CDPs include multi-channel marketing campaign tools, allowing marketers to build emails, text messages, and social campaigns right within the platform. The more robust your CDP integrations are, the more powerful this type of feature set becomes.

Publisher CDP Use Cases

Many publishers inherently know that the deprecation of third-party cookies will drastically change the way their business operates. That’s not an excuse to rush into a first-party solution like a CDP without a plan though. It would be like jumping into an exotic sports car without knowing how to shift gears.

Here, we’ll explore some of the most common use cases leveraged by publishers today.

Audience Development: Connect Web Activity with Other Channels

One of the most fundamental benefits of a CDP is the ability to deeply understand your audience’s activity. By connecting your Google Analytics data to your CDP, you instantly gain access to digitally collected data around website visits, sessions, pageviews, and actions users take on your site.

Combine web analytics with email reporting, and you’ll gain a more complete picture of which customers are engaging with your email content and how often. You can quickly start to see trends and build segments to email more frequently or less frequently based on engagement. You can start to determine what types of content a user is most likely to click on in email. These insights aren’t just based on their past email activity, but on all of their site browsing habits.

Ad Operations: Interest-Based Ad Segments

As ad tech providers grapple with privacy constraints, CDPs offer ad ops teams a chance to leverage their first-party data. It does so in a way that enables them to sell advertisers on high-value, interest-based segments of their audience.

Publishers can set up web-based listeners for visitor interests and behaviors on their sites. These listeners gauge the interest in the types of content users interact with most often.

This approach to audience segmentation is good for everyone:

1. Visitors who consent to tracking enjoy personalized offers as they browse the site and can ensure their information remains private.
2. Advertisers can reach highly-targeted audiences without the concern that a DSP’s alternative solution to third-party deprecation is working as intended.
3. Publishers can scale their ad revenues directly by creating real-time segments in minutes.

Affiliate Marketing: Referrals & Attribution

Affiliate marketing is big business for many publishers, and a CDP can play nicely into their existing affiliate strategy.

A CDP allows publishers to see which customers engage most with outbound links and affiliate content on their site. Leveraging these insights, they can promote more of that type of content or recommend products in similar categories. They can also build direct follow-ups to promote affiliate offers through other channels.

These additional touch points give affiliate teams the context needed to track conversions and attribution. Not only by affiliate tracking ID or subtags but also by the channels and communications involved in generating those conversions.

You can then use these insights to form more direct relationships with advertisers and affiliate partners, providing clear, detailed results.

Subscription Management: Renewals & Reactivation

Whether your company is a digital only provider or you ship physical products to your customers, there’s a case for using your CDP for activating subscription data in a way that’s both relevant and timely.

If your CDP offers propensity modeling, you have the ability to target customers who are likely to churn. Reach them with more customized messaging than regular renewal offers where the risk is much lower.

The platform leverages data in real-time to start the conversation early and maintain the urgency to renew. Reminders can be delivered right up until the final hours of a customer’s subscription.

Publishers who integrate their CDP with email service providers and print on demand partners can even trigger custom messages and postcards reminding their subscribers to renew in a completely automated fashion.

Editorial: Premium Content Access

Editorial teams often struggle to define the hard monetary value of the content they create. On an article-by-article basis, a CDP can help make the case for value with a dynamic paywall solution.

By segmenting subscribers from non-subscribers, publishers can run tests against their non-subscriber audience with tools like content metering. Your strategy can be based on each customer segment. With this, you could meter certain types of content for categories, keywords, or authors. This ensures that the right paywall message reaches them at the right moment depending on their activity.

For example, take a visitor that reads a disproportionately large number of articles from a single author. You could show them a paywall offer explaining how their subscription directly supports that author. Meanwhile, visitors who read a wide variety of articles could see a more general paywall offer.

CDP Starts With Strategy

Modern CDPs are capable of producing highly personalized experiences for your users. But they only do this if you configure them to do so. To truly benefit from the use of a CDP, publishers need to develop and advocate for their own strategy. By partnering closely with your account team, you can ensure you’re kept up-to-date as new features and integrations are released. You’ll also have a channel for surfacing feature requests that would support your initiatives.

If you’re struggling to realize the full potential of your CDP or just getting started, get in touch.

Granite Data Pro actively supports publishers, digital media companies, and DTC brands of all sizes with their CDP infrastructure. Our services including roadmap planning, monetization strategy, data integrations, and audience activation.