Originally appeared on MediaPost
As the digital ecosystem becomes more complex, managing multiple identifiers for consumers has emerged as a significant challenge. From cookies and IP addresses to mobile IDs and universal IDs, marketers and platforms face increasing difficulty in maintaining a unified view of their consumers. Without a coherent identity strategy, campaigns can suffer from poor targeting, limited personalization, and flawed attribution.
Experian understands these challenges and offers solutions to help our partners navigate the complexities of a multi-ID landscape. By utilizing both digital and offline data, we provide the tools to unify fragmented identifiers and maintain a persistent view of consumers. As a result, marketers and platforms get rich insights, accurate cross-device targeting, improved addressability, and measurable advertising.
The shifting identity landscape
For years, the industry has relied on cookies to identify consumers across devices and platforms. However, with ongoing signal loss, including the uncertainty around cookies, and the evolution of privacy regulations, the digital identity landscape has grown more complicated. As consumers hop from one device to another, they are now represented by multiple signals, each tied to a different aspect of their digital behavior.
While this shift brings complexity, it also opens the door for innovation. Marketers and ad platforms now have the opportunity to rethink their identity strategies and adopt more flexible approaches that are not reliant on a single identifier.
This is where Experian comes in.
Connecting the dots: A holistic view of the customer journey
Our identity solutions are designed to help manage today’s multi-ID ecosystem by connecting digital and offline identifiers to a single customer profile. This creates a unified view of the consumer, and when combined with our understanding of customer behavior (e.g. demo, interests, shopping patterns) marketers and platforms get both insights about their customers and the addressability to reach them across channels.
Four examples of what you can do with a strong identity foundation
- If an advertiser wants to make its first-party data more addressable, it can utilize our Digital Graph with universal IDs, hashed emails (HEMs), and connected TV (CTV) IDs to extend its reach.
- A publisher who wants to gain further insights into their audiences and create private marketplaces (PMPs) can achieve this goal with the use of our Digital Graph with hashed emails, universal IDs, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), CTV IDs, and IPs. The publisher can use this in concert with Marketing Attributes to understand age, gender, household income, buying behavior, and more. The publisher can connect marketing attributes to the Digital Graph via our Living Unit ID (LUID) to understand more about consumers that fall into their segments.
- A demand-side platform (DSP) who wants to extend first-party and third-party audience reach across all digital devices on their platform will use the Digital Graph with all digital IDs to allow users of their platform to select cross-device extension against first-party and third-party audiences.
- A retail media network (RMN) can use our Offline and Digital Graphs to connect in-store and online purchases to a household profile—even when purchases are made by different people. The RMN can then reach that household across digital media platforms and accurately attribute the in-store purchase back to digital ad exposure.
Identity as a strategic asset: Today and in the future
In our paradoxical world where consumers are represented by multiple identifiers, yet marketers and platforms face signal loss, identity is more than a technical issue—it’s a strategic asset. The ability to unify identity data into a single profile provides marketers with the customer intelligence needed to drive growth and stay competitive. Here’s how we do it:
- Deep, persistent customer understanding: With roots in offline, deterministic data like names, addresses, and emails, we provide an accurate and persistent view of identity to our customers. This allows you to maintain a consistent and comprehensive understanding of your customers and their marketing attributes over time.
- Highly accurate and refreshed digital identities: Our signal-agnostic graph is not reliant on any one signal as it includes HEMs, cookies, MAIDs, IPs, Universal IDs, and CTV IDs. Our Digital Graph is updated weekly, ensuring the data is always fresh and addressable. This persistent linkage of individuals and households to their identifiers and devices means your campaigns are always targeting the right people.
- Connected offline and digital graphs for holistic insights: We connect offline and digital identities by following privacy-first best practices, such as preventing re-identification, to allow insights from the offline world to be used in the online world. This integrated approach, enriched with marketing data, gives you better insights, more addressable advertising, and the ability to engage customers across multiple devices while accurately measuring campaign impact.
Transform challenges into opportunities
The rise of the multi-ID landscape presents both challenges and opportunities for the advertising industry. We stand as the trusted partner to navigate this complexity, utilizing insights from the offline world to inform decisions in the online world, enabling personalized marketing and accurate attribution, and helping you achieve your current and future goals.
Latest posts
We all knew heading into the holiday season that consumers were going to be highly sensitive to price due to the economic conditions, paving the way for an increase in online deal seeking. Coupon websites experienced growth in visits throughout the holiday season as shoppers searched for promotional codes to use online and printable coupons for offline purchases. The weekly market share of visits to coupon websites increased 15% from the previous year during the week of Thanksgiving & Black Friday and also increased 16% during the week of Cyber Monday. Overall, visits to the custom category of 70 websites increased 17% and 12%, in November and December, respectively, as compared to the previous year. Coupon website referred traffic to retailers relies upon the availability of promotional codes and coupons for a given retailer. The availability of coupons and desired savings can certainly help to finalize and capture the transaction, making participation with coupon websites beneficial to the majority of retailers – particularly as many offer discounts & promotions during the holiday season and consumers inevitably share them anyway. In December 2008, the most commonly visited product categories following a visit to a website within the coupon category were department stores, computers, and appliances & electronics. One interesting point is that many shoppers are looking for coupons from a specific retailer or brand, suggesting that many coupon searchers may be further along in the purchasing funnel and are close to making the purchase – but may need some type of final incentive. For the week ending December 27, 2008, 69% of the searches for the top 300 search terms that include ‘coupons’ also included a specific brand such as Pizza Hut, JCPenney, or Target. The other 31% of searches to include the term ‘coupons’ were generic in nature, seeking out grocery coupons, online coupons, and free printable coupons.