Best Practices for Activating with Matching Partners

Overview of Activation Delivery

When you have an audience in Resonate's Ignite platform and you're ready to activate, there are two solutions available for Activation Data Delivery for our clients.

1. A direct connection to your endpoint.  This solution has the highest precision and match rate. Resonate and the Client Activation Endpoint maintain an ongoing synchronization of anonymous ID keys to enable any audience defined in the Resonate platform to be integrated to the Client solution with the highest precision and match rate.  

Direct integration enables self-service opportunities.  Self-service activation begins with a Resonate customer initiating an audience delivery.  The audience data is matched using a shared table of anonymous user IDs and delivered to the destination for ingestion.

2. Or an indirect connection - where we go through a partner like LiveRamp.  In some cases, popular media management platforms will not permit direct delivery of audience data.  Media platforms such as Google require audience data to be delivered through previously integrated and accredited data delivery intermediaries.

It's important to understand that Resonate data is at the individual user level yet LiveRamp exists for max scale, not precision. When we deliver Resonate cookies to LiveRamp, they match our individual level identifiers to their own identifiers. When they do this matching they will use a Household-level match when they don't have a great match at the individual level. They also use a cross-device graph to include additional related identifiers--all for max scale. This householding and cross-device matching on the LiveRamp side all contributes to the growth of matched segments.

Impact of Indirect Audience Delivery:

Matching partners ingest a set of Resonate IDs and attempt to match as many as possible to their own database of known online anonymous user IDs through a proprietary process.  As the matching partner recognizes a Resonate ID, they query an internal device graph to scale up as many related IDs as possible.  These include other desktop IDs, related mobile IDs, related mobile advertiser IDs, even other related records in the same household.  This happens when online matching partners are designed to provide as much online activation scale as possible.  This scale is provided at the expense of precision.  At each step in the matching process, bringing in related IDs can introduce a drift from the original set of attributes.  The more steps to the process, the more likelihood that drift from the original set of attributes will be introduced. 

Recommendations for Self Service Activation

Customers wishing to manage their own activations should choose their destinations based on the overall goals of their campaign.  Resonate uses direct and indirect integrations and each have their own benefits and limitations.  Directly integrated activation partners provide the most precise matching while indirect partners provide the most scale.

Resonate customers should use direct activation partners like Adobe, and the Trade Desk when precision is paramount.  Destinations like these are integrated with Resonate through a data API (Application Programing Interface) which supports high resolution and precise matching.  These API-based destinations will introduce the least amount of attribute drift and will provide the most accurate measurement in Resonate.  While direct activation partners will support the most accurate measurement, they will not benefit from maximum cross device scaling.

Resonate customers should use indirect integrated activation partners like Google when scale is paramount.  Resonate is integrated with some activation partners through third party matching partners like LiveRamp.  These indirect destinations will benefit from cross device audience extension and will provide the most scale when activating.  Google DoubleClick Bid Manager, Campaign Manager, and DoubleClick for Advertisers and Publishers are good examples of these indirect integrations that leverage LiveRamp for data distribution.  These destinations will introduce the most drift from the original set of attributes.  Measurement in Resonate will reflect this drift when using indirect activation destinations.  

1. When a match partner like LiveRamp is used to activate an audience, it can take up to 7 business days for the audience to be available in the endpoint, as this is LiveRamp’s standard SLA.
2. If you are activating to Google via LiveRamp, please follow these instructions.