How to Decode the Offline/Online Match Process

“Marketer’s Note” is a weekly column informing marketers about the rapidly evolving, digital marketing technology ecosystem. It is written by Joanna O’Connell, Director of Research, AdExchanger Research.  

Digital marketers are sitting on a gold mine – their own organization’s first party data– and they are finally starting to tap into it. Chances are, millions of dollars have likely been spent in the building, cleansing, segmentation, and activation of this precious marketing resource in offline and other CRM channels. As organizational siloes continue to crumble, we see more and more companies extending the use of their traditional first party data sets into digital environments, whether for suppression of messaging to existing customers, reactivation of lapsed customers or the like (there are lots of cool applications of this data!)

But, through my regular conversations with marketers, I get the sense that many find the actual process of translating their data – which often includes personally identifiable information, or PII – into usable, anonymized digital data murky and hard to understand, let alone explain to colleagues. To that end, I’d like to share some questions I’d ask potential match partners (such as LiveRamp) if I were considering them for such an endeavor:

• What is the step-by-step process for performing the match?
• Where does your offline data come from (Is it proprietary? Licensed from 3^rd parties?)? What form does it take? How do you verify its validity and quality?
• Where does your online data come from? i.e. How do you build and maintain a matchable cookie pool? Do you have a stable suite of partners with whom you have direct relationships? How, if at all, do you validate cookie stability and quality?
• What kind of scale can I expect, and at what point in the process?
  • What kind of match rates do you typically see between your data set and client data sets?
  • What percentage of matched cookies are you typically able to reach?
  • Is there some kind of ramp period?
• Do you match iteratively? What’s that process? How frequently?
• What resources should I expect to make available from my side?
• What contractual and legal processes – if any – will we need to go through?

As always, the above list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it should prove a helpful place to start in your efforts to decode the offline/online match process!

Thoughts, comments, send them my way!

Joanna