Introduction

LiveRamp and Lytics have joined forces to offer a powerful integrated platform designed to address the complex challenges businesses face in managing and activating customer data. This groundbreaking partnership combines the industry's first Enterprise Customer Data Platform (CDP) with best-in-class, multi-channel, multi-platform identity resolution. While the partnership has tremendous long-term potential far broader than outlined in this document, we've focused the initial approach on 3 key challenges.

Key Challenges

Identity resolution poses a significant challenge for marketers today. With fragmented customer data spread across various systems and channels, creating a unified view of customers and accurately targeting them becomes problematic. However, overcoming this challenge through effective identity resolution brings immense benefits. By consolidating and resolving customer identities, marketers can better understand their audience, enabling them to deliver highly personalized and targeted campaigns. This leads to improved engagement, higher conversion rates, and stronger customer relationships. Solving the identity resolution puzzle empowers marketers to optimize their marketing efforts, enhance customer experiences, and drive better business outcomes.
Campaign Delivery, due largely to the deprecation of 3rd party cookies or a viable alternative, is difficult due to an absence of identifiable information and limited visibility into their journey. Delivering personalized experiences and effectively tracking performance is nearly impossible without those key insights. Additionally, privacy regulations further complicate the task of balancing personalization and respecting user privacy.
Enrichment, or lack thereof, of the user profiles that you do have results in activating based on a fragment of the behavioral picture. Failing to comprehend your consumers entirely results in inaccurate targeting, reduced conversions, impressions, and poor overall engagement. Finding techniques to enrich consumer profiles is necessary for an effective marketing strategy. More than simply improving consumer profiles, creating a scalable mechanism to integrate these enhanced profiles into existing activation channels will accelerate marketing success.

Approach

Fortunately, the following approach ensures brands have a path for overcoming the above challenges.

Collect Customer Data
The initial stage focuses on aggregating all 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party engagement channels while subsequently ensuring a means to resolve independent interactions into a single user profile.
Manage User Profiles
This aggregated data is then unified into individual customer profiles, providing a comprehensive view of each customer and their engagement across different touchpoints. By materializing these interactions into cohesive user profiles, marketers gain valuable insights, a holistic understanding of their customers, and a clear means to take action.
Activate Audiences & Insights
Marketers can identify specific groups with similar needs and preferences by segmenting the customer base, enabling them to deliver targeted and personalized interactions. This ensures that the right message reaches the right audience, optimizing engagement and driving better outcomes. With profiles and segmentation working hand in hand, marketers can uncover valuable insights about their consumers, leading to more effective and impactful interactions.
Analyze & Iterate to Maximize ROI
The final step in the process involves analyzing the results of marketing efforts and continuously iterating based on the insights gained. This step is made effortless by utilizing in-depth custom reports powered by real-time feedback.

Lytics

Lytics plays a key role in the above approach by:

Specializing in collecting data from diverse customer touchpoints via hundreds of turn-key, pre-built connections spanning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data.
Unifying this data into a complete and accurate view of your customer, complete with robust tooling for defining, managing, and maintaining complex identity resolution strategies.
Leverage the latest in AI/ML to add additional inferred attributes like propensity and affinity to each customer profile.
Surfacing rich insights which enable the creation of hyper-targeted audiences that are updated in real-time. Ensure you always communicate based on the most accurate and timeline data set.

LiveRamp

LiveRamp extends the value by:

Bringing the world’s most extensive and accurate independent identity graph(s) built on 45+ years of offline data (Abilitec) to the table.
Providing an identity that is universal across channels, providers, and brands.
Supports activation across the largest network of technology providers, publishers, and data providers across the media ecosystem in just a few clicks.
An unrelenting commitment to ensuring that data is used safely and that data owners maintain control.

Solution

Even the most well-crafted strategies can falter without a robust and battle-tested architecture in place. The following outlines the technical details, what systems are used, and how they all tie together to overcome some of the key challenges companies ultimately face.

Architecture

Before we jump into how it is essential to understand the what, below, we have defined the key components that make this groundbreaking partnership truly shine.

LiveRamp Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS)

ATS helps publishers recognize known users on their sites in real-time, enabling data-informed targeting and increasing the value of your inventory. Unlock new revenue streams with the enhanced direct, private marketplace, and open exchange targeting on authenticated ad inventory.

LiveRamp Real-time Identity Service (RTIS)

Integrations with LiveRamp are built around communicating via RampIDs, their people-based, cross-device identifiers. One such service, ATS, is defined above when a known user identifier such as email is available. For anonymous users, however, we leverage their Real-time Identity Service Tag.

LiveRamp AbiliTec

LiveRamp's offline identity resolution solution, AbiliTec, allows you to resolve your consumer PII (such as email address, name, postal address, etc.) into AbiliTec IDs. This allows you to resolve your consumer PII across fragmented data sources into a unified view of those consumers to gain an accurate customer profile for your business and improve customer data management that powers effective customer engagement.

RampID

RampID is LiveRamp's universal, pseudonymous identifier that is tied to devices in the LiveRamp Identity Graph. LiveRamp maintains the market's most extensive and accurate people-based identity graph by focusing on people-based resolution. LiveRamp matches disparate cookies, proprietary platform IDs, mobile devices, and anonymized offline touchpoints (such as email addresses, postal addresses, and phone numbers) to their common, people-based ID - RampID.

LiveRamp Identity Envelope

An Identity envelope is an opaque and encrypted structure containing RampIDs and metadata. Each envelope is created with a client-specific encryption key that makes it unique. An envelope is valid for 30 days from the date of creation. Lytics picks up this encrypted envelope to generate a persistent identifier linked to the RampID.

Lytics RampID

The Lytics RampID is an encrypted version of the primary RampID specific to the Lytics platform. This ensures a persistent means to resolve identities globally via AbiliTec to activate via LiveRamp or its supported partners directly.

Technical Execution

Step 1: Obtain and Link an Encrypted Envelope

To resolve identities, we must first create a link between a Lytics identifier, such as our _uid and the RampID. This is done in one of two ways, depending on how well you know about the consumer in question.

Anonymous Users

In cases where no strong identifier is available, such as email, we leverage the power of RTIS. This is often the case when looking to engage unauthenticated website visitors or similar scenarios. This approach results in Lytics leveraging a standard tracking pixel to request that the Lytics _uid be associated with a RampID via envelope. The full technical details of this particular integration can be found here.

Known Users

In cases where a strong identifier is available, we leverage the power of ATS. This is often the case when looking to engage authenticated users or users who have engaged with some form of email data collection, such as a newsletter signup. This approach is similar in that it results in an encrypted envelope being associated with a _uid, but it leverages a different service and native JavaScript to do the heavy lifting. Technical implementation details for this scenario can be found here.

Step 2: Translate the Encrypted Envelope

Regardless of which combination of approaches above are leveraged, the next step in the execution is to ensure the short-lived envelope is translated into a persistent Lytics RampID. This step is made incredibly simple by leveraging our out-of-the-box LiveRamp enrichment integration. Technical details for this particular integration can be found here. Still, fundamentally, it will run in the background and perform a lookup for every user that does not yet have a persistent Lytics RampID but does, in fact, have an encrypted envelope associated with their profile. Upon completion of the translation, the Lytics RampID will be stored as a profile attribute to enable activation via LiveRamp and other supported channel partners.

Step 3: Deliver Campaigns via RampID

The final piece of the puzzle is solved by simply activating your insight-rich audiences maintained within the Lytics platform through the LiveRamp activation workflow.

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We highly recommend that campaign audiences to be activated within the LiveRamp ecosystem have a filter to ensure only users are included that have a firm identifier, ideally a Lytics RampID as described in this overview.

Additional Considerations

Probabilistic vs Deterministic

Understanding the potential impact on data accuracy is paramount when incorporating Liveramp’s probabilistic matching capabilities into your marketing strategy. While there are definite benefits to leveraging probabilistic matching, such as expanded audience sizes and mitigated profile sparsity issues, merging profiles with only a 60%-90% accuracy rate or adding data that isn’t perfectly aligned with a profile can significantly impact the consumer experience. This is particularly concerning when it comes to activation channels where the wrong ad or incorrect personalized content could erode trust and hinder engagement. Furthermore, consumer data is crucial to AI and data science for creating predictions and determining scores and affinities. Incorrect data could jeopardize the modeling, scores, and affinity performance. Fortunately, Cloud Connect offers customers the flexibility to add fuzzy or probabilistically matched data to profiles with minimal impact on data compliance or accuracy.