Making the case for purchase and intent data in programmatic

Programmatic has more data than ever, and marketers still can’t answer a simple question: Did this drive sales? The answer is apparent. Purchase and intent data shouldn’t be one more targeting input layered on. It should be what everything else is built around.

Why it’s different

Most audience data tells advertisers who someone is and what bucket they fit in. That’s useful, but it’s an inference. Purchase and intent data tells what someone is actually doing right now, and whether they’re about to buy. 

That’s why retail media has grown so fast. As retail media networks, loyalty programs and commerce platforms mature, more signals are tied directly to transactions. It’s the one part of the stack that can walk into a CFO’s office and point to a real sale. Other data types mostly optimize for attention. This is the one that optimizes for outcomes, so it should be central to planning, targeting and measurement, not a specialty add-on for certain advertisers.

Partners have built silos, not systems

Purchase and intent data lives in a lot of places: retailers, card networks, loyalty platforms and a growing list of measurement vendors. Each has its own taxonomy, latency and methodology. So marketers get conflicting signals and are left to reconcile them by hand.

Retailer A says the campaign drove double-digit lift. Measurement Partner B says it was flat. Neither is necessarily wrong, because they’re measuring different things in different ways over different timelines. But it wears down trust in everything that’s done. If partners can’t agree on what a sale looks like, they haven’t earned the right to say they can measure one.

Partners need to rally

Audience providers and measurement partners have spent years competing on dataset size. That race is over. Third-party data is shrinking under privacy pressure, and signal is getting harder to find. The next thing to compete on is credibility. 

There are three parts to establishing credibility:

• Shared standards for what counts as a conversion tied to ad exposure, instead of five proprietary definitions.
• Real interoperability, so an audience partner’s signal can be checked against a measurement partner’s outcome data instead of each side grading its own homework.
• Transparency about methodology. Marketers shouldn’t have to take a lift number on faith.

None of this needs new technology. The infrastructure to connect exposure to purchase already exists. What’s missing is the willingness to agree on what proof means.

The proof is in the sales

The partners who move first will win trust, and they’ll win budget too. When every dollar is questioned, marketers will consolidate spend behind the providers who can show a clean, agreed-upon line from impression to sale.

Programmatic doesn’t have a data problem. It has an alignment problem. The partners who solve it will be the ones who can show, in terms that marketers and their CFOs both trust, that the work drove a sale.

Partner insights from The Trade Desk