Why You Can’t Skip A/B Testing Your Audience Providers

Here’s something we hear all the time: “Which third-party audience provider should we use?”

The better question is: “Which provider should we test first?” Because here’s the reality: there’s no universal “best” audience provider. The right choice depends entirely on your specific business, your campaign objectives, and even the platforms you’re advertising on.

The Secret Sauce That Isn’t So Secret

Here’s what many people don’t realize: all third-party audience providers are working with essentially the same underlying data. What separates Provider A from Provider B isn’t access to some magical data source no one else has. It’s what they do with that data, how they enrich it, organize it, and apply their proprietary methodologies to make it actionable.

Think of it like this: two chefs can start with the same ingredients and produce completely different dishes. From the outside, two audience providers might look identical. Same data sources, similar audience sizes, comparable pricing. But their “secret sauce,” the algorithms, enrichment processes, and data modeling they use, can produce dramatically different results for your campaigns.

The only way to know which secret sauce works for your particular recipe? You have to taste-test them both.

When the “Winner” Depends on What You’re Making

We recently put this to the test in our own campaigns, and the results perfectly illustrate why blanket recommendations about audience providers are essentially useless.

Test #1: Paid Social Showdown

In Q3, we ran a head-to-head comparison of Swoop and IQVIA as third-party audience providers for paid social campaigns. Both are well-respected names in healthcare marketing, and both provided custom audiences for a specific condition and related treatments across Meta and TikTok.

Right out of the gate, Swoop delivered 2x the profile matches—3.6-4.2M on Meta versus IQVIA’s 1.5-1.8M, and 8.5M on TikTok versus 4.4M. But audience size is just one metric.

Over a six-week A/B test, we measured what really matters: quality and efficiency. The results? Swoop absolutely dominated:

• Quality Score: 39% for Swoop vs. 11% for IQVIA (and 21% for our broad targeting baseline)
• Cost Per Lead: $3.6K for Swoop vs. $5K for IQVIA

Here’s where it gets interesting: IQVIA’s lead conversion rates (click to lead submission) were actually comparable to or even slightly better than Swoop’s. But when we looked at lead qualification rates, Swoop crushed it. This suggests that Swoop’s data enrichment process, perhaps including more granular identifiers like diabetes type, made their audiences significantly more qualified for this particular use case.

Based on these results, we paused IQVIA and went all-in on Swoop for this campaign. Case closed, right? Swoop is the winner? Not so fast.

Test #2: The Plot Twist

A few months later, we conducted another test, this time comparing IQVIA’s third-party medical audiences against Meta’s native interest-based targeting for HCP campaigns across two medical specialties. IQVIA crushed it. And I mean crushed it.

Medical Specialty A:

• 64% lower CPMs with IQVIA
• 16% higher click-through rates

Medical Specialty B:

• 27% lower CPMs with IQVIA
• 164% higher click-through rates
• 127% improvement in conversion rate

Across both specialty segments, IQVIA outperformed Meta’s native targeting on every critical metric. But here’s the kicker: IQVIA’s audiences weren’t initially successful using our standard approach. We had to develop a completely new two-stage framework to unlock their potential:

This framework leveraged IQVIA’s precision targeting for awareness, then used Meta’s retargeting capabilities to efficiently convert engaged prospects, combining the strengths of both platforms.

What This Really Tells Us

So what’s the takeaway from all this? Swoop won for paid social targeting around a specific condition. IQVIA won for HCP specialty targeting on Meta. And these results prove exactly what we’ve been saying: the “best” provider is entirely context-dependent.

Success with third-party audiences hinges not just on the quality of the data, but on how those audiences are deployed, what outcomes you’re measuring, and what your specific business needs are.

The provider that delivers the lowest cost per lead for a DTC pharmaceutical campaign might not be the same one that delivers the best qualified HCPs for a B2B medical device campaign. The audience that performs best on Meta might underperform on TikTok. The targeting strategy that works for awareness might fail at conversion.

This is why we test. And then we test again. And then we test some more, depending on what audience we need, what outcome we’re chasing, or what business we’re working with.

The Bottom Line

Yes, testing takes time. Yes, it requires budget. Yes, it means running campaigns that might not perform as well as you’d hoped. But the alternative (making assumptions about which provider is “best” based on reputation, price, or someone else’s case study) is essentially leaving money on the table.

So if you’re evaluating audience providers right now, our advice is simple: stop looking for the “best” one and start testing to find the right one for your specific needs.

The only universal truth about audience providers is this: you won’t know until you test.