Any marketer knows they need to understand their audience to deploy an effective campaign. But with the rise of digital and programmatic advertising, marketers are tasked with understanding massive quantities of users that interact with their content in the digital realm.
Identity resolution is an important mechanism of modern marketing. In a nutshell, it is the process of comparing data points of digital users and aggregating them into an identity graph. Identity resolution allows marketers to understand their current and potential customers. This can lead to an increase in conversions with those customers.
Additionally, having a precise identity graph of target audiences can help marketers improve ad targeting and maximize their ad spend on deployed campaigns. Nielsen reports that 92% of consumers believe suggestions from friends and family are more effective than advertising. So, identifying those unique connections in the digital realm through identity resolution can help them achieve more with their marketing budget.
Identity resolution also allows brands to create a personalized and contextual marketing strategy that boosts conversions and sales.
Suffice to say, identity resolution can play a transformative role in your marketing gameplan. However, many marketers don’t know how to execute it in an effective way. Here are some tips and techniques for improving identity resolution and maximizing your programmatic advertising budget:
Start with your identity graph
We’ve established that identity resolution joins together data points from privacy-protected customer profiles. But the actual matching of those data points occurs in an identity graph. The identity graph is essentially a database for connecting points that align with a particular person or user.
Think about the sites and platforms you visit regularly. Then, imagine a web of connections that link your digital activities to a customized profile. Those profiles are then used to target specific ads or messages to you based on your interests, so you’re only seeing ads that are tailored to you. The process of optimizing and understanding your identity graph is identity resolution.
Use a deterministic approach
There are two main types of identity resolution: probabilistic and deterministic. Probabilistic matches data points on potential customers. It’s based on the probability that two data points belong to the same person. The benefit of this approach is that probabilistic data is much more common. This means that marketers can enhance their identity graphs at scale.
While probabilistic does advance your data towards a better understanding of your audience, deterministic provides a better framework for sorting through audience data. Deterministic identity resolution leverages first-party data to determine which data points belong to the same identity. In other words, with deterministic identity resolution, you know for certain the identities you’re targeting campaigns to are the people you think they are.
Root out the bad data
Bad data is essentially poison for your identity graph. We’ve mentioned that deterministic data can help mitigate the bad targeting. But in reality, most marketers must also rely on probabilistic data. That being said, not all probabilistic data is bad. Probabilistic data can lead marketers towards better ad targeting, but it cannot be end-all be-all.
With a mix of structured and unstructured data, marketers can enrich the profiles in their identity graphs by extrapolating single identifiers (like an email for example) into a whole person. This process of data enrichment provides additional context about the people you’re targeting, as opposed to just being a datapoint on a spreadsheet.
With these techniques, marketers gain a better grasp on their audiences, improve the targeting of their ad campaigns, and ultimately save valuable ad budget by not wasting money targeting bots or irrelevant audiences. To learn more about how to effectively target with deterministic identity resolution, visit our website.
