First-Party Data File Formatting Guidelines & Best Practices

This document outlines the best practices and file format for both the onboarding and append processing. Please fully review the file requirements specified below so that we can process your data as quickly as possible. 

Use Resonate’s hashing script for optimal match rates (option 1 below). Resonate’s hashing script automatically removes any leading or trailing spaces and changes all email addresses to lower case prior to hashing to provide the highest possible match rates.

Best Practices for Optimal Match Rates

• Ensure the emails are as up to date as possible. Old emails that are no longer active tend to generate low match rates.  
• Ensure all email addresses are from the US. Resonate’s data is US only and we are not able to match against international emails.  
• Emails must all be in lower case before hashing (Resonate’s script will do this for you)
• Trim all leading and trailing spaces from email addresses (Resonate’s script will do this for you)
• After hashing ensure that your hashes are comprised of alpha numeric characters
  • Examples:
    • MD5 (preferred): 32-character hexadecimal number. For example, ec55d3e698d289f2afd663725127
    • SHA-1: 40-character hexadecimal number. For example, A94A8FE5CCB19BA61C4C0873D391E987982FBBD3
    • SHA-256: SHA 256 is a part of the SHA 2 family of algorithms, and generates a 64-character hexadecimal number. For example, 051f26bd6cde782239bf52e56854d3feeca75ae5a84508d1ff9a1868ba167ee5

Option 1 (recommended): File Formatting for Unhashed Emails: Follow these formatting instructions if you have regular email addresses that you need to hash. Once formatted, you will use Resonate's hashing script to hash your emails.

Option 2: File Formatting for Existing Hashed Emails, MAIDs, or IP Addresses (IP is for onboarding only): Follow these formatting instructions if you have one of the following IDs: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, IPv4, or MAID. 

Option 1: File Formatting for Unhashed Emails

1. One file per ID type

• Example: File #1 with SHA1 and File #2 with SHA2

2. All four column headers are needed within the file even if there is not data for a particular column.

• Column 1 Header: ID Type
• Column 2 Header: Email
• Column 3 Header: Add
• Column 4 Header: Remove

Data Append

3. Use this checklist to verify elements before uploading to Resonate:

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Option 2: File Formatting for Hashed Emails, MAIDs, or IP Addresses (IP is for onboarding only)

1. One file per ID type

• Example: File #1 with SHA1 and File #2 with SHA2

2. All four column headers are needed within the file even if there is not data for a particular column.

• Column 1 Header: ID Type
• Column 2 Header: ID
• Column 3 Header: Add
• Column 4 Header: Remove

Data Append

3. Use this checklist to verify elements for before uploading to Resonate:

• File contains all 4 required column headers
  • ID Type
  • Email
  • Add
  • Remove
• Add/Remove column data is formatted as group=segment
• File is in a .csv format
• File name is correctly formatted as <ID type>_<client name>_<date>
• File contains the minimum number of records per segment - 20K  (onboarding only)
• File doesn’t contain more than the max number of records per file - 50M  (onboarding only)
• File doesn’t contain more than the max number of segments per file - 100  (onboarding only)

4. Once your file is in the correct format, please save with the following name:

5. Upload your file to the appropriate location: