Your Key To Reducing Media Waste: Smarter Suppression Lists

If you haven’t heard of suppression lists, you need to learn more about them and integrate them into your strategy. Why?

Suppression lists are among the easiest ways to reduce media waste, and when you know how to use them correctly, they improve programmatic efficiency, too. It’s necessary to approach suppression lists cautiously, avoiding suppressing too broadly or not suppressing audiences enough. The path forward is to be smart and precise about which users you target and when, helping improve your brand’s reach without hindering it.

The Issue With Blunt or Conservative Suppression Strategies

The problem with suppression strategies that are too blunt or conservative is that they don’t effectively help you reach the right audiences. The “blunt” version can be as dramatic as excluding anyone who has ever visited your website or interacted with your brand — that’s not necessarily a good choice, especially if you want to work with retargeting options. 

On the other hand, conservative strategies can also be problematic. If you exclude almost no one from the approach, then you’ll likely waste money, repeatedly expose low-value audiences to your content, and fail to see a positive change in your media spend.

How Poor Suppression Undermines Your Strategy

Poor suppression causes inflation in one way that is extremely frustrating to businesses — it overexposes people to their content when those audience members have already churned and decided not to buy, cannot currently buy, or have already converted. Many of these audience members will click again, but that doesn’t mean that those clicks are valuable. Instead, you end up with false performance metrics that do nothing to help with media waste reduction.

If your teams work in silos and measure in isolation, the problem can be even more significant. For example, if one channel continues to retarget converters, it might seem like it deserves the last-click credit. However, the truth could be that it’s only the last step in a multi-stage-long process involving many touchpoints. 

So, what is the fix? It’s not just about measuring more closely, but instead stopping waste by excluding audiences that shouldn’t be included in the first place.

The Data Is Key in Suppressing Audiences

It’s wise to use true business data rather than platform signals when you’re planning on which audiences to suppress. For example, good suppression data might include:

-Recognized, confirmed converters, particularly when they were recent buyers/converters
-Specific sales pipelines status levels, such as “in-contract” or “do not contact”
-Geographic/serviceability limits, which your brand cannot fulfill
-Frequency and fatigue controls, aiming to ensure audiences aren’t overwhelmed with your messaging

Poor suppression could occur if you use data such as:

-Old site visitors with no use of recency or intent signals
-Overly broad engagement pools, such as “anyone who has viewed the page”
-Suppression that only considers demographics instead of overall eligibility to make a purchase or convert

You’ll also want to consider using suppression tactics that are designed to consider more flexible, cross-platform scenarios, such as cookie loss or ID-less approaches, instead of relying only on a single identifier that could throw off the system.

The Trade-off Between Protecting Efficiency and Limiting Scale

When you make a decision to suppress a part of the audience, it’s a trade between being more efficient and limiting the ability to scale. Excluding too many people for too long hinders brand reach. To address this, consider shorter suppression campaigns of 30 to 90 days. You can also consider suppressing in-progress leads to avoid retargeting too soon — 7 to 14 days is usually enough. And finally, don’t forget about using frequency caps to help minimize oversharing content with the same users. 

Here’s How Smarter Suppression Supports Performance and Reach

When your suppression process is in alignment with your goals and tied to your customers’ life cycle stages, you’ll see:

-Fewer wasted impressions on audience members not suitable for your brand
-Improved, not hindered, reach, from keeping the right audiences eligible for your content
-Improved optimization, which is a result of the algorithm learning from the right audience. 

Audience suppression can make a difference for your brand. Keeping your audience in mind, limiting heavy-handed suppression, and taking a reasonable approach can help improve suppression lists, reduce spend, and maintain positive reach.

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