Cuebiq’s mission, as an offline intelligence and measurement company, is to deliver the most accurate and reliable insights on how digital marketing efforts impact offline consumer behavior. This case study shows how Cuebiq, despite signal loss, partnered with Experian to continue delivering in-store lift analyses. To achieve this, Cuebiq used Experian’s Activity Feed to resolve digital ad exposures to in-store purchases, so that marketers could know the effectiveness of their clients’ media campaigns.
Activity Feed helped Cuebiq increase its match rates by using all the identifiers supported in Experian’s signal-agnostic Digital Graph, reducing its reliance on third-party cookies. By partnering with Experian, Cuebiq could help their clients, marketers, more accurately measure their campaigns and optimize their media.
What is Activity Feed?
Experian’s Activity Feed pulls together fragmented digital event data from all digital channels, including browsers like Safari and Firefox that restrict traditional tracking methods. Activity Feed ingests and ties this digital ad exposure data to household or individual profiles hourly, helping clients associate that data to offline purchase activity made by that household or individual. Activity Feed plays a crucial role in overcoming fragmented data and helping marketers accurately measure their cross-channel marketing efforts.
Challenge: Increasing match rates across digital platforms
Cuebiq wanted to enhance how well they connect digital ad exposures, across web, mobile and connected TV (CTV) to specific mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), of those who visited clients’ stores. They needed a single technology partner who could collect data across these environments and improve these connections, especially as iOS updates, like iOS 14.5, posed potential challenges.
With the ability to resolve exposures to households, individuals, and MAIDs to then facilitate attribution of digital exposures to offline store visitation, Cuebiq could continue to provide accurate reports on how online ads impact offline consumer behavior. This clarity in data enables their clients to fine-tune their marketing strategies.
Cuebiq’s key objectives included:
- Resolving digital exposures to MAIDs
- Increasing overlap of offline and online data
- Improving the effectiveness of offline measurement offerings
Activity Feed: The solution to increase match rates
Cuebiq used Activity Feed to resolve data from cookieless environments like Safari to a single household or individual and saw significantly higher match rates. Cuebiq was able to track cross-channel media exposures, resolve them to MAIDs, and then use the Activity Feed output to correlate in-store visitation and sales to their clients’ media campaigns. Cuebiq also implemented the Experian pixel, which they placed to track all their marketers’ impressions (mobile, CTV, web traffic, etc.). The Experian pixel collects information in real-time, such as:
- Timestamp
- Cookies
- Device ID (MAID/CTV) when available
- IP address
- User-Agent
- Impression ID
“Before we started working with Experian, we couldn’t fully maximize ad views across the complex digital landscape. In just a few weeks, they were able to maximize the match rate across the fragmented digital inventory, solving a huge problem when it comes to cross-channel attribution.”
Luca Bocchiardi, Director of Product, Cuebiq
Results
Activity Feed combines separate data streams and matches them back to a household. This enables Cuebiq to expand household IDs and accurately identify MAIDs that are seen in-store for cross-channel measurement. Over a 21-day period, Cuebiq passed ~1 billion events to Experian. Activity Feed resolved 85% of total events to a household, 91% of which were tied to MAIDs.
By implementing Activity Feed, Cuebiq was successfully able to:
- Gain clearer insights into the success of their client‘s campaigns
- Match consumer engagements in a privacy-compliant manner
- Tell the story of the key performance indicators (KPIs) related to their marketing efforts
Prepare for a cookieless future with higher match rates
Activity Feed is prepared for a cookieless future and uses alternative IDs, like ID5 IDs, hashed emails, and IPs for identity resolution, ensuring no reliance on third-party cookies. Experian remains fully committed to exploring a suite of next-generation solutions and prioritizing continued testing of different industry solutions, including the Google Privacy Sandbox, to help customers prepare for a future without cookies. We’ve identified six viable alternatives to third-party cookies, how these alternatives fall short, and how Experian can help you navigate these alternatives.
“Experian’s customer service is extremely efficient and collaborative. We trust them to keep putting our business first long-term.”
Luca Bocchiardi, Director of Product, Cuebiq
Download the full case study to discover how Cuebiq used Activity Feed to overcome their challenges. Your path to maximizing match rates and resolving data from cookieless environments starts here.
About Cuebiq
Cuebiq is transforming the way businesses interact with mobility data to providing a high-quality and transparent currency to map and measure offline behavior. They are at the forefront of all industry privacy standards, establishing an industry-leading data collection framework, and making it safe and easy for businesses to use location data for innovation and growth.
To learn more, visit their website at www.cuebiq.com
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Originally appeared on MarTech Series Marketing’s understanding of identity has evolved rapidly over the past decade, much like the shifting media landscape itself. From the early days of basic direct mail targeting to today's complex omnichannel environment, identity has become both more powerful and more fragmented. Each era has brought new tools, challenges, and opportunities, shaping how brands interact with their customers. We’ve moved from traditional media like mail, newspapers, and linear/network TV, to cable TV, the internet, mobile devices, and apps. Now, multiple streaming platforms dominate, creating a far more complex media landscape. As a result, understanding the customer journey and reaching consumers across these various touchpoints has become increasingly difficult. Managing frequency and ensuring effective communication across channels is now more challenging than ever. This development has led to a fragmented view of the consumer, making it harder for marketers to ensure that they are reaching the right audience at the right time while also avoiding oversaturation. Marketers must now navigate a fragmented customer journey across multiple channels, each with its own identity signals, to stitch together a cohesive view of the customer. Let’s break down this evolution, era by era, to understand how identity has progressed—and where it’s headed. 2010-2015: The rise of digital identity – Cookies and MAIDs Between 2010 and 2015, the digital era fundamentally changed how marketers approached identity. Mobile usage surged during this time, and programmatic advertising emerged as the dominant method for reaching consumers across the internet. The introduction of cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs) became the foundation for tracking users across the web and mobile apps. With these identifiers, marketers gained new capabilities to deliver targeted, personalized messages and drive efficiency through programmatic advertising. This era gave birth to powerful tools for targeting. Marketers could now follow users’ digital footprints, regardless of whether they were browsing on desktop or mobile. This leap in precision allowed brands to optimize spend and performance at scale, but it came with its limitations. Identity was still tied to specific browsers or devices, leaving gaps when users switched platforms. The fragmentation across different devices and the reliance on cookies and MAIDs meant that a seamless, unified view of the customer was still out of reach. 2015-2020: The age of walled gardens From 2015 to 2020, the identity landscape grew more complex with the rise of walled gardens. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon created closed ecosystems of first-party data, offering rich, self-declared insights about consumers. These platforms built massive advertising businesses on the strength of their user data, giving marketers unprecedented targeting precision within their environments. However, the rise of walled gardens also marked the start of new challenges. While these platforms provided detailed identity solutions within their walls, they didn’t communicate with one another. Marketers could target users with pinpoint accuracy inside Facebook or Google, but they couldn’t connect those identities across different ecosystems. This siloed approach to identity left marketers with an incomplete picture of the customer journey, and brands struggled to piece together a cohesive understanding of their audience across platforms. The promise of detailed targeting was tempered by the fragmentation of the landscape. Marketers were dealing with disparate identity solutions, making it difficult to track users as they moved between these closed environments and the open web. 2020-2025: The multi-ID landscape – CTV, retail media, signal loss, and privacy By 2020, the identity landscape had splintered further, with the rise of connected TV (CTV) and retail media adding even more complexity to the mix. Consumers now engaged with brands across an increasing number of channels—CTV, mobile, desktop, and even in-store—and each of these channels had its own identifiers and systems for tracking. Simultaneously, privacy regulations are tightening the rules around data collection and usage. This, coupled with the planned deprecation of third-party cookies and MAIDs has thrown marketers into a state of flux. The tools they had relied on for years were disappearing, and new solutions had yet to fully emerge. The multi-ID landscape was born, where brands had to navigate multiple identity systems across different platforms, devices, and environments. Retail media networks became another significant player in the identity game. As large retailers like Amazon and Walmart built their own advertising ecosystems, they added yet another layer of first-party data to the mix. While these platforms offer robust insights into consumer behavior, they also operate within their own walled gardens, further fragmenting the identity landscape. With cookies and MAIDs being phased out, the industry began to experiment with alternatives like first-party data, contextual targeting, and new universal identity solutions. The challenge and opportunity for marketers lies in unifying these fragmented identity signals to create a consistent and actionable view of the customer. 2025: The omnichannel imperative Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the identity landscape will continue to evolve, but the focus remains the same: activating and measuring across an increasingly fragmented and complex media environment. Consumers now expect seamless, personalized experiences across every channel—from CTV to digital to mobile—and marketers need to keep up. The future of identity lies in interoperability, scale, and availability. Marketers need solutions that can connect the dots across different platforms and devices, allowing them to follow their customers through every stage of the journey. Identity must be actionable in real-time, allowing for personalization and relevance across every touchpoint, so that media can be measurable and attributable. Brands that succeed in 2025 and beyond will be those that invest in scalable, omnichannel identity solutions. They’ll need to embrace privacy-friendly approaches like first-party data, while also ensuring their systems can adapt to an ever-changing landscape. Adapting to the future of identity The evolution of identity has been marked by increasing complexity, but also by growing opportunity. As marketers adapt to a world without third-party cookies and MAIDs, the need for unified identity solutions has never been more urgent. Brands that can navigate the multi-ID landscape will unlock new levels of efficiency and personalization, while those that fail to adapt risk falling behind. The path forward is clear: invest in identity solutions that bridge the gaps between devices, platforms, and channels, providing a full view of the customer. The future of marketing belongs to those who can manage identity in a fragmented world—and those who can’t will struggle to stay relevant. 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