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Best practices for cleaner and more reliable audience data

Last updated: March 3, 2025

Audience data hygiene isn’t just a best practice or busy work. It’s essential for getting actionable audience data. Actionable data drives growth and revenue.

Think of your valuable audience data as a garden. You likely spent a lot of time, money and effort planting the seeds, cultivating and creating that beautiful garden of first-party data. It only makes sense that you need to take regular care to maintain that garden of data.

The same goes for your database. If you want to use your audience data to create better experiences and drive revenue, you can’t just clean your lists once a year and hope for the best. Everyone in your organization needs a consistent, replicable and documented process for standardizing audience data sources and eliminating outdated information — and they need technology that makes it easier to do that.

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In this article, we’ll walk through some audience data hygiene best practices and show you how Omeda’s audience engagement platform can help you keep your data clean and useful.

Best practices for audience engagement data hygiene

Take in high-quality, first-party data

Your lead data quality has a direct impact on your ROI and advertising efforts.

Make sure that everyone across your organization — from editorial to ad sales and audience — is only taking in audience data that has been voluntarily and legally provided directly by the end user (i.e., the user has chosen to share their personal demographic and behavioral information with you via a transparent, clear mechanism, like an opt-in email form).

Validate customer information from the first contact

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It pays to ensure you have several verification steps throughout your data collection process so that you’re starting with accurate, complete customer data.

Look for tools that integrate with validation services. For example, Omeda integrates with AtData (formerly FreshAddress) to ensure that each form submission is coming from a valid email address. (On Omeda, this only costs one cent per email entered). When the integration’s active, the user will receive an error message if they try to submit a form with a fake or invalid address.

Look for a database provider that can handle bulk verification. For example, at Omeda, we’ll take a list of subscribers, send it to a service like AtData for email verification, then retroactively apply changes to our database.

Add reCAPTCHA to your web forms to prevent bots and bad actors from submitting forms and adding faulty data to your database. Worried that complicated validation processes will keep people from completing your forms? No need: Version 3 of reCAPTCHA works silently in the background of your forms, so users don’t need to “pick out the image of the motorcycle” before submitting the form. (You’ll need to create an account for reCAPTCHA to do this.)

Conduct regular database cleanups (and clean your email list even more often)

As a best practice, you should regularly review your audience data and remove unengaged subscribers at least once (and possibly even a few times) per year.

Conduct quarterly database merges to keep your database clear of duplicates. (Note: If you’re a company or a brand that has magazine products, Omeda runs regular merges for subscribers associated with those magazine products.)

What about email database cleanup?

We recommend cleaning your email list at least quarterly if not monthly. That’s because inbox service providers are using more sophisticated barometers of audience engagement to decide whether your emails are trustworthy and whether they should send future emails to your recipients’ primary inboxes.

Five years ago, as long as you weren’t actively violating anti-spam laws, you’d likely land in primary inboxes most of the time. But now, if readers regularly ignore your emails, it’ll hurt your inbox placement more quickly — and then you’ll have trouble getting in front of the readers who are still interested. So clean your email list and run re-engagement campaigns quarterly if not monthly.

How Omeda helps keep data clean and actionable

Standardization, good data hygiene practices and knowing your audience are all important aspects of managing your audience database.

Focus on the query tools that you use to run searches and segment out your audience. Keep the field library within your query tool as streamlined and clean as possible.

We also recommend that you standardize naming conventions across all of your products, brands, email deployments, behaviors and demographics. (Think of it as a brand guideline for your data.) Since your teams spend a lot of time querying and segmenting the audience, keeping this area clean will save time, reduce frustration and ensure that every search is as accurate as possible.

Some of this takes some good old fashioned discipline — but we also have some features that’ll make this process easier for your team. More on that below.

Use profiles to streamline your workflows and access levels

Simply put, profiles are a segment of your audience database that you’ve created from a query you’ve already done.

For example, you could have a profile that contains only valid email addresses. Once that profile’s saved in your database, you can send only to “good” email addresses without needing to manually rebuild that list of clean contacts.

Note: The fields on the left-hand side of your Audience Builder field library are completely customizable. So you can search for a profile right within Audience Builder, then use it to create segments and run campaigns. You can also regulate access to specific profiles, which keeps your data more secure and prevents unrelated teams from being confused/distracted by irrelevant data points.

Use Query Fields to save and replicate frequently used searches

The more queries your team is building manually, the more likely you are to get non-standard naming conventions or faulty data.

The solution: Use Query Fields within your Audience Builder database to improve workflows and save time. Just run a query within your database, click Save as a Query Field, and it’ll be added as a field within your database. Then you can run additional searches for that audience with one click.

This way, you can create complex and/or frequently used queries and reference them quickly in the future — without risking data quality or integrity.

In this example, I’ve searched our database for “consistently engaged audience members.” I saved it as a “query field” to make sure it appears as a field within my database going forward.

Use our Data Science and Most Recent Engagement Date fields to easily identify and remove inactive users from your database

Our Data Science model gives each user an engagement score, then assigns them to a specific engagement-based segment, based on how frequently and recently they’ve engaged with your website and emails. (We do this using an unsupervised machine learning technique that measures engagement based on five factors — learn about it here.)

Users can be assigned to one of three groups — “consistently engaged,” “recently engaged” or “at-risk,” all of which can be queried using Audience Builder. Use this to quickly surface audience members that a) consistently engage, b) have recently engaged, or c) are at-risk, and target communications to each group.

For example, you might run a VIP campaign or loyalty discount for your consistently engaged audience. For your recently engaged audience, you might run a promotion for your paid subscription, using content recommendations to surface articles personalized to their specific interests. And for that at-risk audience, you might run a re-engagement campaign or remove them from your list to keep your list clean.

If you just want to find and remove anyone that’s gone dark in a specific period of time, query them by Most Recent Engagement Date.

The Most Recent Engagement Date field looks for someone’s interactions across all of your email products, deployment types, subscription products, behaviors and all of your website domains that you’ve set up for website tracking.

Customize this query to fit your needs. You can also narrow your search to specific channels and search over any date range you desire.

In the example below, we’re looking for anyone that has opened or clicked an email since November 1, 2024.

Prefer to learn through video? Watch Data Hygiene Best Practices

Struggling with siloed subscriber data, complicated workflows, and declining audience engagement? What if you could unify your subscriber data and use it to create better subscriber experiences with less effort? Discover how Omeda’s integrated Audience Engagement Platform helps teams like yours unify their subscriber data and strengthen their media businesses. Request a demo.

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