A Common Misconception: Anonymous Data is Less Good

Traditionally, insights were tethered to a person. The “who,” if you will. Shane did this, and then he did this, and then he did this, and…

Shannon Bryan

Oct 28, 2021

Traditionally, insights were tethered to a person. The “who,” if you will. Shane did this, and then he did this, and then he did this, and so on. Then Shane is grouped with a bunch of other people, and from this an insight is generated.

Clearly this is a privacy and security nightmare, with every action tracked and connected to your identity.

But insights do not have to be tethered to people. With TIKI, they aren’t. User anonymity is vital. So we’re building a system where instead of tracking individuals, we use events. An event being, receiving an email from company x, searching y, watching z.

— Read how access to this anonymous data benefits SMBs

How is this as good, or potentially even more powerful than the old way of doing things? Well, as Aristotle said, we are the sum of our actions. When you connect events across sites, apps and platforms, the result is a more comprehensive, yet anonymous, picture. Let’s take the most common use case, digital marketing. Not only can you perform traditional re-targeting by messaging users throughout their journey, you can now message in context.

Ask any marketer: contextual ads result in higher conversions at lower costs. An unfortunate reality of the current system is companies lack the appropriate data, particularly at scale, to pull it off. This results in annoying, irrelevant ads following you across the internet. While we’re using digital marketing as an example, this same logic applies to most, if not all, data-driven aspects within a business. Shane published a fantastic conceptual piece on this our last update.

Let’s take a very specific, recent example from Barry’s life. Barry was in the market for a new fridge. He Google’d a few things about the latest models, did some research, went to the store and bought one. Two weeks later, the fridge is installed, and he’s still complaining that his feed is full of fridge ads. Classic. Traditional “who” based targeting is the culprit. Barry was identified from his first search as a guy in need of a fridge. They say the magic number in advertising is “7”, as in, a customer needs to see an ad seven times before they buy something. So, what do current systems do? Barry needs a fridge, so it fills his life with lots and lots of fridge ads for the next several weeks, almost regardless of what else he’s doing, reading, watching or buying.

Now, what if you knew customers who purchase your fridges (or better yet your competitor’s) take these seven steps (events). Wouldn’t it be more effective to spend your ad dollars there? Better yet, what if you could identify the exact events with the greatest opportunity, whether that be from your customers churning or a competitor’s weakness? What if you could simply run a campaign with a conversion goal and the system was smart enough to place your content where and when it would be most effective? This is just a microcosm of what you can do with TIKI’s knowledge graph.

Traditionally, data has been siloed. As a business owner you see data about your customers on a specific platform. For example, on Facebook you can see analytics on who clicked on your ad — not what other ads they clicked, not what other products they own, not what they searched for, nor what brands emailed them. TIKI is an entirely different view of the problem; it’s a story told from the point of view of the user. A user’s story spans hundreds or even thousands of companies and throughout that journey are opportune moments. We help you pick the right ones.

At TIKI we index events, not people.

— Shane, Mike, and the rest of the TIKI team

About TIKI

At TIKI, we believe what happens with your data should be your decision. Right now, that’s not the case.

With the TIKI app, you can see what data you share online and make informed decisions on who else can see it. Best of all, if you choose to share, we make sure you get paid.

Learn more about what we’re building at TIKI at mytiki.com.

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