How to monetize your data?

How to monetize your data?

The amount of data in the public domain is growing at an exorbitant rate. Data is generated by a variety of channels, including online transactions, social media, search engines, web traffic, and more.

The value of data to businesses is that it speaks to the interests and needs of their audience, allowing them to improve customer experience and find ways to attract new customers.

As a company, you can have the ability to monetize data from using your own data and you can buy data from other sources. If you have high-quality data, it makes sense to start capitalizing on it. How? Here we come to 5 steps to monetizing a resource as valuable as data in today’s world.

What sites can be monetized?

Monetizing is theoretically possible for any site: informational, news, or commercial. But in practice, monetization will only be successful if there is sufficient traffic and the right method of monetization is chosen. For example, with a small number of visitors you are unlikely to receive a good income from placing contextual ads or banners. But if your small audience has value in the eyes of direct advertisers, you can earn good monetization by publishing advertising articles.

1. Identify the data sources.

What kind of data do you have at your disposition and how can/need to add to it to make it more valuable?

Do an analytics of everything you have and understand how it all relates to each other. This is where it’s worth thinking about how someone might use your data. Determine what other information you’ll need to make it into a ready-to-use product.

To monetize data effectively, first of all, answer yourself these three questions:

• What types of data does my business collect?
• From what sources does this data come?
• Where is this data located and stored?

Once you know where to look, you can start organizing your data.

2. Data organization.

At this point, you will be required to organize the data in a way that you can use it immediately.

This means that the data needs to be collected, combined, structured, and verified for future approaches to monetizing. During this process, your data will begin to look like a finished product that other companies will find useful and want to buy.

Each step corresponds to specific types of behaviors or demographics. These categories are very flexible and can easily be added to, corrected and deleted.

Each subcategory is a segment. It is these segments that are mixed and matched to form audiences for targeting campaigns. They are what you will sell to your data buyers.

3. Data monetization

Once the data is organized, create segments of their special kinds that will be useful to others. Some typical categories of high-demand segments date include:

• Demographics (age, gender).
• Extended demographics (wealth level, number of children).
• Behavior and Interests.
• Purchase intentions (travel, fashion, etc).

Also, think about whether you have any niche unique data? These just might be incredibly valuable to the right buyer. Try to analyze your data in terms of potential insights you can provide to someone. When you start monetizing your data, try to convey those advantages in your communication.

These advantages can include insights on the demographics of buyers of specific product segments, their preferences, online behavior, and more.

In addition to identifying the segments you want to monetize, you need to understand what is unique about your data.

4. Selling Data and Data-monetization strategies

When your data is packaged and ready for monetization, you need to determine where to sell it now. The two most popular ways to sell data are second-party and third-party data.
In this step, consider exactly how customers will access the data, how the terms of agreements will be set, and how pricing will be formed. It’s worth considering the legal aspects of creating product value.

Create a price list. Here are two types of typical pricing for data products:

1. Value-based pricing: based on the cost of creating the data product + margin.
2. Value-based pricing: based on the value your data can provide to the customer and therefore what they are willing to pay.

Pricing factors to consider include data volume, frequency of updates, completeness, information scarcity, organization, reliability, and ease of analysis.

That’s where the hard part comes in – deciding on cost. If you’re more or less on topic, you’ve probably seen prices for audiences ranging from $1 CPM through programmatic direct to $50+ for data with high demand or premium content.

To be clear, the price of your data is 100% your financial decision. But since this question is very relevant to many, we’ve highlighted a few hints for you.

At what times might you want to raise the price per audience?

There are times when you will want to raise the CPM that is paid for your data. Why?

• The audience is created exclusively from your first-party data (and you value it, right?).
• Audiences are retargeted to the advertiser’s own users (if they use pixel platform tracking).
• The audience is built on “enrichment” (meaning users have been on the site or used the app in the past).
• The audience has a demanded relevance and frequency of updates (if you need a freshly gathered audience for a particular task).
• The audience is very, very small and exactly matches the advertiser’s requested characteristics.
• Audiences will be used across platforms and cross-device.

You may need to test pricing to understand how it fits into the realities of the marketplace.

Conclusions

In this data-driven world, any information you collect can accelerate your economic growth. The trick is to use it effectively. Your customer data is the key to the success of your business.

The better you organize your process, the easier it will be for you to drive data to market.
And MonetizeIt team knows how to do this better than anyone else.