What is identity resolution?
Introduction
Recognizing a unique individual across all marketing channels is essential for delivering a seamless customer experience. However, as the number of platforms and channels grows, so does the challenge of managing fragmented data.
The ability to recognize an entity, be it a person, place or thing, along with associated relationships, consistently and accurately based on both physical and digital attributes, regardless of channel, location or device with contextually appropriate levels of precision. – Identity Definition
Identity is Key to Insights and Engagement
To address this, identity solutions help brands unify fragmented data, enabling accurate identification of consumers across touchpoints and devices, whether online or offline. This process is essential for delivering exceptional, personalized experiences.
Types of Identity Solutions:
- Identity Matching: Links data sources by comparing identifiers like hashed emails or digital IDs.
- Identity Resolution: Overcomes challenges like outdated data and integration issues to create a comprehensive identity graph for accurate consumer identification.
- Identity Management: Builds on matching and resolution, enabling brands to create unique identity graphs that incorporate first-, second-, and third-party data.
Benefits of Identity Solutions:
- Unified Customer View: Ensure data accuracy across all channels for effective business operations.
- Unlock Insights: Personalize experiences and drive engagement with a 360-degree customer view.
- Competitive Edge: Tailor solutions to unify data and gain a market advantage.
- Maximized Marketing ROI: Deliver the right message to the right audience across the right channels.
- Long-Term Retention: Foster loyalty with consistent, relevant experiences that build trust.
The Challenge and Solution: Achieving true identity resolution is an ongoing challenge due to evolving technologies and customer expectations. To succeed, brands need a solution that maintains high-quality data, integrates various data types, and complies with privacy regulations while ensuring accurate, persistent customer identification.
Fragmented data
Fragmented data presents a significant challenge for marketers, making it difficult to identify and recognize individuals across various touchpoints and platforms. This challenge has grown with the rise of digital marketing channels, where data about customers is scattered across multiple devices, platforms, and identifiers.
Identity in the Digital Age
In the past, identity tracking was based on name, address, and other basic data. However, in today’s digital age, customers engage across various devices and platforms using identifiers like email addresses, mobile numbers, device IDs, and even location data. This has made it increasingly difficult to form a complete, unified customer view.
Key Components of Identity Solutions:
- Who is this person? – Personal identifiers like name, address, email, mobile number, and biometrics.
- Where is this person engaging? – Device insights, such as mobile devices, smart cards, etc.
- How is this person behaving? – Observed or reported behaviors, actions, and interactions.
These components must be managed in a privacy-compliant and secure manner.
The Complexity of Identity
The term “identity” in marketing is often used loosely, but a true identity solution goes beyond matching email addresses or identifiers. A robust identity solution should link data points across channels to create a comprehensive, single view of the consumer. This includes connecting multiple representations of the same individual, both online and offline.
Offline and Digital Recognition
- Offline recognition: First-party data like CRM and point-of-sale data is invaluable, but it must be tied to the correct individual for effective engagement.
- Digital recognition: Identifying users across different devices and channels, each with distinct identifiers (like cookies, device IDs, or browsers), can be complex. Identity solutions help link these data points to ensure consistent, privacy-conscious identification.
Identity Graphs
An identity graph is a tool that connects fragmented data, creating a comprehensive view of a customer across touchpoints and devices. It links diverse data sources with unique identifiers to provide a more holistic and accurate customer profile, enabling better marketing strategies and customer experiences.
Deterministic vs. Probabilistic Matching
- Probabilistic matching uses “fuzzy matching” to infer connections between similar data points. It’s useful but less precise.
- Deterministic matching, often used in identity graph solutions, ties digital representations to the same individual based on more accurate data, ensuring a more accurate identity resolution.
Benefits of Identity Solutions:
- Unified Customer View: Combines offline and digital data to form a single, comprehensive profile.
- Reduced Risk: Minimizes data risks and ensures accurate identification and engagement across channels.
- Ethical Data Practices: Utilizes privacy-conscious methods for identity resolution.
- Future-Proofing: Ensures that identity management can evolve with changing data regulations and technologies.
While identity resolution solutions are crucial for managing fragmented data, integrating first- and third-party data with an identity management solution is key. This holistic approach ensures accurate, privacy-compliant identification across all marketing ecosystems.
Deterministic vs. probabilistic matching
As consumer identities continue to evolve, achieving accurate, people-based marketing across digital and offline channels presents a complex challenge. This is especially true with handheld devices, where cookies often don’t work, complicating identity tracking.
Identity Matching Methods
To address this challenge, two primary consumer identification methods have emerged: deterministic matching and probabilistic matching.
Deterministic Matching
Deterministic matching identifies consumers based on information they use to log into websites or apps (e.g., Facebook, WiFi login). It links multiple devices to a single identity by matching common identifiers such as:
- First and last name
- Email address
- Date of birth
- Address
- Phone number(s)
This method offers high accuracy and reliability but requires users to be logged in to a platform, limiting its scope.
Probabilistic Matching
Probabilistic matching uses browsing behavior and location data to infer a user’s identity across devices. This approach relies on algorithms to analyze traits like:
- IP address
- WiFi ID
- Location
- Demographic details (age, gender, interests)
Known as “device fingerprinting,” probabilistic matching can be up to 90% accurate, making it a powerful tool for linking user profiles across devices without requiring a login.
Comparing Deterministic vs. Probabilistic Matching
- Deterministic matching offers privacy compliance by using direct identifiers to create a reliable individual profile. It’s effective when users are logged in but is limited by this requirement.
- Probabilistic matching, on the other hand, uses inferred data, like location and behavior, to link devices and profiles. This method is valuable for time-sensitive, contextual messaging.
Combining Both Methods
To optimize identity resolution, a combination of both deterministic and probabilistic methods is often necessary. By blending traditional data elements (e.g., name, address, date of birth) with device-related data, marketers can reach consumers with relevant messaging across devices and platforms.
However, both methods must adhere to privacy and compliance standards to maintain consumer trust and ensure ethical data use.
Marketing to people
Effective identity solutions are essential for achieving superior people-based marketing, allowing marketers to recognize and engage real people across channels and devices in real-time, rather than marketing to anonymous personas or devices. The benefits are vast, including:
- Securing consumer trust and loyalty
- Optimizing marketing resources and budget
- Staying competitive in a fragmented, expanding digital world
Impact Across Industries
Identity solutions are crucial across all industries. With consumer data fragmented across multiple channels, the ability to identify individuals at the right time, across the right touchpoints, is a game-changer in building loyalty.
For example, in retail, aligning the digital and offline worlds to provide a seamless experience is key. If a customer is browsing online while in-store, marketers must recognize this and offer personalized experiences in real time.
In Financial Services, additional regulatory requirements demand even higher levels of compliance and transparency, while still achieving effective identity resolution to build consumer trust.
Ensuring Privacy in People-Based Marketing: Privacy and compliance are at the core of identity solutions. Marketers must strike a balance by using identity resolution in ways that consumers accept and understand, ensuring their consent and delivering value without compromising trust. Consumers expect brands to recognize them and deliver personalized, convenient experiences.
Consumers must opt-in for tailored experiences, and brands should respect when customers do not want that level of recognition, ensuring they act accordingly.
Creating a Unified View of the Customer: A true people-based solution integrates necessary data points, processes, and management to create a unified, single customer view. This enables marketers to build a more complete and accurate profile, driving better engagement and customer experience.
Better advertising ROI
With an identity solution, marketers and advertisers can achieve real-time, pinpoint effectiveness in people-based marketing, optimizing their budget and increasing ROI.
The Use Case: Consider a CMO deciding which advertising or marketing technology to invest in. The right decision can significantly impact results and ROI. Here, identity is crucial because it helps the CMO understand exactly where to allocate funds by providing clear insights through multi-touch attribution.
How It Works: Identity solutions “seed” user impressions from a central system, allowing marketers to track and analyze touchpoints across channels. Without this, achieving a clear, unified view for attribution would be challenging, if not impossible.
Maximizing ROI with Multi-Touch Attribution: In today’s digital marketing landscape, particularly with the increasing shift from offline to digital advertising, multi-touch attribution is key to maximizing ROI. According to eMarketer, digital advertising spend in 2019 was expected to surpass all other marketing forms for the first time.
Identity, Attribution, and Real-Time Contextual Marketing: With the explosion of marketing channels, identity solutions help consolidate fragmented data and provide unified multi-touch attribution across all channels. This enables real-time contextual marketing, ensuring marketers can deliver relevant messages based on a customer’s journey. For example, if a consumer sees an ad on Facebook, switches devices, and makes a purchase through a paid search ad, a robust identity solution allows marketers to track and engage that individual seamlessly across touchpoints.