How the Covid-19 pandemic is affecting IP targeting

Won’t targeting the companies at their worksite be impossible now when everyone is working from home?

The answer is not as straight-forward as one might think. Yes, the fact that people are working from home might impact the campaigns but not necessarily.

First, everyone is not working from home. An interview study from SCB showed that 15% of the interviewed stated that they worked from home more than half the days in the previous week. There are, of course, huge differences between industries. 56% of people working with Information and Communications worked from home while only 3% working with transport did. 20% of managers worked from home more than half of the days.

Google’s mobility report shows changes in activities on worksites compared to a five-week period in January-February. The report shows that the activity in workplaces is 20% lower in November.

More ad impressions during the pandemic than before

Our Digital Experience Team has been able to deliver more ad impressions during the pandemic than before. The general prices on ad spaces plummeted in the beginning of the pandemic when many companies discontinued their advertising campaigns, resulting in the possibility for us to buy more ads for the same amount of money for our customers.

Overall, we are also reaching companies with ads like before the pandemic, although we are experiencing that some individual companies have been harder to reach. It all depends on how their IP- and IT environment is set up on the individual company level.

Most employees working from home connect themselves to their companies’ network using VPN. If they do, we might have a chance to target them through their IP.

Diffrent VPN solutions 

There are many different VPN solutions. Some use an IP that we can match with the target company and some use an IP that we only can match to an Internet Service Provider. Some VPNs only fire when visiting internal websites meaning the will surf with the company’s IP to their own website but use their private IP when visiting media sites.

We are also showing ads on the targets’ smart phones and it’s the same thing there. Some companies have an IP structure making us able to match the IP used when surfing from their company smart phone, and some don’t.

Just like before the pandemic started, we won’t be able to match and reach 100% of the companies out there. We have seen that some individual companies have been harder to reach since the pandemic started but overall, we are still able to reach most of them.

If the client only has a few accounts that you want to reach with ads, it would be best to reach out to the Dun & Bradstreet Digital’s Customer Experience Team for a test before the campaign starts. If you have a list of 10 or more target accounts, we have a better chance to get some satisfactory reach at around 60-80% depending on market.

This article is written by our senior project leaders at Dun & Bradstreet,  Johan Van der Kwast and Anders Wallin.