How Mobile Advertising IDs (MAIDs) Help Your Cannabis Marketing Dollars Go Further

What are Cannabis MAIDs?

MAIDs, or mobile advertising IDs, are a unique string of digits assigned to a mobile phone. Cannabis Mobile Advertising Ids are used to track location based data and can be connected to hashed emails and IP addresses to link mobile habits to digital, and in-store behavior across all channels back to an individual person. This gives a fuller picture of who your target audience is, where they convert, and deeper insight into how to market to them.

In North America, the average person has 8.2 connections and devices with it forecasted to increase to 13.4 by 2023. When running a cannabis programmatic display ad campaign, you’ll need to track user behavior across channels and devices to customize messaging and deliver campaigns at optimal times.

Using MAIDs gives you visibility into mobile behaviors so you gain a better understanding of your target audience and create more detailed consumer profiles. They can also track and report on behaviors within mobile apps along with geographic location data. MAIDs provide historical location data on mobile devices to help marketers determine where and when users shop, work, and visit regularly.

You can use Cannabis Mobile Advertising IDs to:

• Understand who drives by your dispensary on their daily commute
• Retarget visitors to your cannabis retail location, your competing dispensary shops (and their neighborhoods), and local events like music festivals, or county fairs
• Gain insight into frequently used apps and media they consume as well as household brand preferences.
• Learn about customer interests, demographics, behaviors, and more

Identity Resolution Using MAIDs

Most consumers use multiple devices in their purchasing journey, being able to target your ad campaigns by device will help finetune your cannabis display advertising strategy, assist in targeting customers more effectively and, ultimately, get a better return for your marketing investment.

MAIDs are a powerful piece of the data puzzle used when tracking digital behaviors and resolving user identities. Cannabis businesses can connect MAIDs with hashed emails, IP Addresses, and other first and third party data to resolve user identity and correspond several devices to one user. By doing this, you can see:

• Ad impressions and engagement served
• Overall ad exposure
• Credit conversions to impressions from mobile devices
• Link devices to offline activity and physical locations
• Connect users as they move between various online platforms (i.e., social media, mobile, web, in-app, CTV)
• Improve targeting and retargeting

Another way that consumer behavior can be tracked online is through email hashing. This protects a consumer’s actual email address, but all behaviors and useful data associated with it are traced without compromising privacy.

Are Cookies Still Relevant?

Short answer: yes. But they have their place in cannabis marketing and shouldn’t be used on their own. They’re still relevant but are only used by certain mobile apps and only track a single session at a time.

MAIDs offer a more comprehensive view of customer behaviors and are active for as long as the customer uses that device. Due to MAIDs being associated with mobile devices used by real people, there will be less fraudulent or bot-related issues with marketing data.  

With the future of third-party cookies seeming bleak for marketers, the use of first party data, such as MAIDs, is an option that may perform better for them. MAIDs are an important building block in people-based marketing. Think about it: how often do you use your own phone?

Ready to learn more about how first party data can be used in your cannabis business? Contact us for a strategy session today!