Through a new partnership with U.S. data platform LiveRamp, Eyereturn hopes to bridge the gap between mobile and desktop advertising ecosystems, which remains a major pain point for marketers.
“The ability to link users across all their devices is a major issue, because there really is no common thread that connects my cell phone to my desktop computer at home or at work,” said Brandon Ghaeli, sales and partnerships manager at Eyereturn.
While desktop cookies allow advertisers to collect rich data on users’ online behaviour, little of this can be used when that user switches to a mobile device since the two systems are not connected. The same goes for trying to connect valuable mobile location data back to desktop profiles.
“Being able to merge the location data from mobile over to desktop, and the cookie data from desktop over to mobile, is going to strengthen the user profiles that emerge,” Ghaeli said.
LiveRamp, which is owned by enterprise marketing company Acxiom, offers a widely-adopted data onboarding platform. It helps marketers connect offline data about customers, like purchase history and loyalty, to their online identities, for targeted digital marketing.
But one of its lesser-known services is cross-device user matching. Similar to cookieless cross-device tracking offered by Google or Facebook, LiveRamp connects users across devices by looking at websites they have logged into on different devices. But rather than using a single large publisher to tie together mobile and desktop users, LiveRamp collects data from hundreds of publishers in an international network that each contribute anonymized login data.
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With LiveRamp’s capabilities, Eyereturn can then create cross-device user IDs, and layer on its clients’ first- and third-party Canadian audience data. The resulting user profiles can be used to target programmatic ads on both mobile and desktop.
LiveRamp is well-known in the U.S., but it doesn’t have much of a footprint in Canada, where data-driven marketing is has had less time to mature. Ghaeli said building a bigger presence here was one of the reasons LiveRamp chose to work with Eyereturn, a Canadian DSP.
“Cross-device tracking absolutely on the frontier, but it’s one of those things that we have clients lining up for, asking to be first to test,” he said. “It seems as if this is the holy grail of advertising that clients want.”
