Start.io this quarter launched 18 new advertising audience segments, to help media buyers better target their ads based on mobile signals, including device information, mobile apps, location and more.
These new audience segments are now live on Start.io’s audience building platform Maia, and on leading ad-tech platforms like The Trade Desk, Yahoo, DV360, and more. The new segments include:
- Instagram users
- Pinterest users
- Reddit users
- Snapchat users
- Twitter (X) users
- Discord users
- LinkedIn users
- YouTube streamers
- Amazon Music users
- Square Cash users
- Microsoft Teams users
- Zoom users
- Waze navigation users
- Google Maps users
- Lazada shoppers
- Shopee shoppers
- Temu shoppers
- AliExpress shoppers
Start.io’s mobile advertising SDK is running on more than 500,000 active mobile apps and delivers hundreds of millions of ads per day. This global reach allows Start.io to gather anonymized consumer data about more than 2.4 billion monthly active mobile users, which we use to build audience segments for media buyers.
There are good reasons why advertisers might want to target customers who use specific social networks and online platforms.
Their user research might find that their customer base has strong affinity for a specific brand, and marketing to this group can help their brand grow. Or they’re selling a complementary product or service that dovetails nicely with the offering from an existing brand.
For example, a new food delivery platform might want to advertise to people who currently use DoorDash Dasher and Uber Driver mobile apps. Or a brand that wants to run a Spanish-language ad campaign in a specific region might target people in the area whose mobile keyboard is set to Spanish.
Let’s take a closer look at these new audience segments.
What’s new: More social media apps
This quarter’s new audience segments include the users from seven social networks and tools—Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and Discord.
These new segments give media buyers a more granular look at specific social networks and allow them to target customers who use those networks. Previously, Start.io had bundled these audiences into larger, broader categories, such as “social media users” or “messaging app users.”
Audience segment size*:
- Instagram users: 10 million users in the U.S.
- Pinterest users: 3.5 million users in the U.S.
- Reddit users: 1 million users in the U.S.
- Snapchat users: 7 million users in the U.S.
- Twitter (X) users: 3 million users in the U.S.
- Discord users: 2 million users in the U.S.
- LinkedIn users: 4 million users in the U.S.
What’s new: More streaming apps
Every day, tens of millions of people stream music on Amazon Music, and hundreds of millions watch videos on YouTube. Start.io has added both streaming content platforms to its audience segmentation products.
Audience segment size*:
- Amazon Music streamers: 2 million users in the U.S.
- YouTube video streamers: 2 million users in the U.S.
These two new audience segments join existing Start.io segments such as:
- Apple Music streamers
- Pandora streamers
- Shazam streamers
- Spotify streamers
- YouTube Music streamers
- Amazon Prime video streamers
- DirecTV video streamers
- Disney+ video streamers
- HBO video streamers
- Hulu video streamers
- Netflix video streamers
- Spectrum TV video streamers
- Xfinity video streamers
What’s new: More functional apps
Start.io has added five new audience segments around functional apps—apps that serve a specific purpose, and that people use regularly to do specific things: Pay for things with Square Cash, work using Microsoft Teams, videoconference with Zoom, and navigate with Waze and Google Maps.
Audience segment size*:
- Square Cash users: 3.5 million users in the U.S.
- Microsoft Teams users: 1.1 million users in the U.S.
- Zoom users: 4 million users in the U.S.
- Waze navigation users: 1.5 million users in the U.S.
- Google Maps users: 1 million users in the U.S.
What’s new: More fast-growing shopping brands
The discount shopping app Temu was the most-downloaded new app in the United States in late 2022, and continues to win market share against giants like Amazon and Walmart.
AliExpress is a consumer-facing discount shopping app run by the Alibaba Group, which owns a controlling interest in the Southeast Asia-focused shopping app Lazada. Shopee competes directly with Lazada in Southeast Asia, and claims to the biggest online shopping platform in the region. Shopee is also a dominant ecommerce player in Latin America.
While these four shopping apps are big in Asia and Latin America, they also have a large and growing user base in the United States, typically from resellers and savvy shoppers.
Audience segment size*:
- Temu shoppers: 750K users in the U.S.
- Lazada shoppers: 500K users in the U.S.
- Shopee shoppers: 500K users in the U.S.
- AliExpress shoppers: 1 million users in the U.S.
* A note about audience segment size: Start.io’s audience segments might be smaller than you expect, given that many of the above platforms have hundreds of millions of monthly active users. Start.io collects audience data in accordance with all applicable privacy laws worldwide, which limits the amount of data that we can access.
Notably, Start.io’s 18 new audience segments are deterministic: We know that the anonymized user in question uses the product or service in question. That sets us apart from other data companies, which may offer larger datasets based on probabilistic data, which guess whether an anonymized user in question matches a consumer type, based on other tangential signals.
If you’re a media buyer, reach out to Start.io to learn more about these 18 new audience segments. If you have a specific audience segment in mind that doesn’t exist yet, talk to us about building a custom audience segment using Start.io’s first-party data.
