Brands want more from their media investments: better insights, more efficient reach, and clear proof of performance. Whether you’re starting with high-quality first-party data or need help reaching new audiences, Experian offers flexible solutions to drive reach among key audiences and to measure the impact.
We’ve built two primary activation and measurement solutions tailored to how brands operate, so you can spend less time managing data and more time driving outcomes.
Use case 1: First-party insights to activation and measurement
Best for: Brands with first-party data looking to deepen their understanding of existing customers, activate intelligently, and measure what matters – all through a single trusted partner.
Solution: Audience Engine + Outcomes
Audience Engine
Audience Engine is our self-service platform designed to help you onboard first-party data, gain key insights into your customers, build custom audiences using our powerful data assets, and activate them across 200+ platforms — all within a single workflow.
Outcomes
Experian Outcomes closes the loop by measuring real-world results of your campaigns (such as visits, purchases, and website actions) and tying them back to specific media exposures across digital and TV channels.
Together, these tools offer a full-funnel audience and measurement solution, from planning and activation to proving performance.
Let’s bring this to life
A leading athletic retailer partnered with Experian and Yieldmo to drive in-store foot traffic, targeting shoppers likely to buy from their competitors during key sales windows.
Using Experian’s Audience Engine, which includes our proprietary and third-party data marketplace, Yieldmo built a high-performing, self-serve targeting strategy for the retailer. By combining Experian Audiences with Partner Audiences from Alliant, Circana, Webbula, and Sports Innovation Lab, Yieldmo was able to build apparel and footwear audiences from the data marketplace including:
- In-store shopper segments
- Athleisure purchasers
- Competitive purchasers
Audience Engine also enabled Yieldmo to tap into Experian’s identity graph, expanding cross-channel reach and maximizing campaign scale and precision.
And while not used for this campaign, our Outcomes solution allows advertisers to tie media spend to in-store activity, so retailers can measure true business impact.
Benefits
Understand your customers more deeply
To reveal behavioral, demographic, and lifestyle trends.
Reach your first-party audiences at scale
Across top activation platforms, using Audience Engine’s onboarding capabilities.
Increase your brand awareness
By reaching prospective audiences, using Experian Audiences, Partner Audiences, and lookalike audiences.
Measure campaign effectiveness
With Outcomes, which correlates media exposures (digital and/or TV) with offline and online conversions, visits, or sales.
Optimize future media buys
By using attribution insights to refine targeting, creative, and channel mix based on what’s actually driving results.
Use case 2: Activation and measurement
Best for: Brands that already know who they want to reach and are looking to activate high-quality, data-driven audiences across their preferred media platforms and want to clearly understand what’s driving performance.
Solution: Audiences + Partner Audiences + Outcomes
Audiences
Experian Audiences are pre-built audience segments grouped by shared attributes from Experian Marketing Data built for activation on-the-shelf of top programmatic, TV, and social destinations like FreeWheel, Magnite, and Madhive, in addition to Audience Engine.
Partner Audiences
Experian’s Partner Audiences are high-quality audience segments sourced directly from 30+ leading third-party data providers like Affinity, Circana, and Dun & Bradstreet. These segments are curated across verticals like Business, CPG, Health, Retail, and Travel, and are available through on top media destinations, in addition to our data marketplace for easy selection and deployment.
Outcomes
Experian Outcomes helps close the loop by tying real-world results back to media exposures across digital and TV channels.
Together, these products empower marketers to activate smarter and prove success with confidence.
Let’s bring this to life
A leading fashion brand set out to grow their customer base by reaching high-intent shoppers where they spend their time: online. Their goal: drive e-commerce conversions through a programmatic campaign powered by The Trade Desk.
To do it, they needed more than just reach, they needed accuracy. That’s where Experian came in.
On The Trade Desk, the brand quickly discovered Experian’s prebuilt audience segments, readily available and easy to activate. They selected:
- Age Range: 25–44
- Women’s Fashion Frequent Spenders: Households identified as frequent purchasers of women’s apparel, cosmetics, jewelry, and accessories—based on verified, consumer-reported transactions from the past 24 months.
These segments gave the brand confidence that it was putting its message in front of the right consumers, those most likely to engage and buy.
To understand whether their campaign was driving results beyond impressions, the brand implemented a site pixel to capture both top-of-funnel visitation and bottom-of-funnel conversions.
Using Experian’s Outcomes solution, they were able to close the loop—tying ad exposure directly to e-commerce sales. The Outcomes report showed clear campaign lift, highlighting which channels and audience segments performed best. Armed with these insights, the brand refined their targeting and messaging for future media buys—boosting ROI with each iteration.
Benefits
Reach your ideal audience at scale
By activating Experian Audiences and Partner Audiences off the shelf at digital and TV platforms.
Access privacy-conscious, diverse data
Curated by 30+trusted data providers in verticals like Business, CPG, Health, Retail, and Travel without needing to manage multiple data contracts.
Understand what’s working
Through Outcomes reporting, which connects media exposure to offline and online outcomes like conversions, purchases, or visits.
Continuously improve performance
By using attribution insights to inform audience selection, creative strategy, and media channel mix for future campaigns.
Bring this to your brand
Experian’s activation and measurement solutions for brands gives you the tools to act with clarity: from onboarding your first-party data to reaching new customers and tying media back to real results.
Whether you’re starting with deep customer insights or building campaigns from scratch, here’s how our solution helps:
Audience Engine
Onboard your first-party data, gain insights into audience composition, build custom audiences using Experian and Partner Audiences, and activate them across 200+ leading platforms — all through a centralized, self-service platform.
Audiences and Partner Audiences
Reach high-intent prospects using Experian’s syndicated audiences or custom-built segments from partners like Circana, Dun & Bradstreet, and more.
Outcomes
Understand what worked. See how media exposure correlates with actions like store visits, quote requests, site activity, or purchases.
Every element is built to help you scale campaigns, improve addressability, and tie media spend to results that matter—without the overhead of multiple vendors or disjointed systems.
Ready to see it in action? Get in touch with our team.
Latest posts
Study reveals that brands with more mature identity programs were significantly more likely to be successful in achieving their key objectives Tapad, a part of Experian, a global leader in cross-device digital identity resolution and a part of Experian, has commissioned Forrester Consulting, part of a leading research and advisory firm, to conduct a new study that evaluates the current state of customer data-driven marketing and explores how marketers can use identity solutions to deliver privacy safe and engaging experiences, in an evolving data landscape. The study highlights the changing ground rules for digital marketing and the threat that poses to marketers’ ability to deliver against long standing KPIs and campaign goals. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents said that the forces of data deprecation will have a significant (40%) or critical (21%) impact on their marketing strategies over the next two years. Among those surveyed, identity resolution strategies have surfaced as an opportunity to create more powerful customer experiences, with 66% aiming to have it help improve customer trust and implement more ethical data collection and use practices, while nearly 60% believe it will point the way to more effective personalization and data management practices. Although organizations are eager to implement identity resolution strategies, a complex web of solutions and partners makes execution a challenge. For example, respondents report using at least eight identity solutions on average, across nearly six vendor partners, and they expect that fragmentation to persist in the ‘cookieless’ future. Additionally, brands’ identity resolution technologies typically represent a patchwork of homegrown and commercial solutions. Eighty-one percent of respondents use both in-house and commercial identity resolution tools today, and 47% use a near-equal blend of the two. Despite the challenges, many brands have the foundation for a strong identity resolution strategy in place, and they are thriving as a result. Specifically, more mature brands were 79% more successful at improving privacy safeguards to reduce regulatory and compliance risk, 247% more successful at improving marketing ROI, and over four times more effective at improving customer trust compared to their low-maturity peers. Additional insights include: Marketers Are Increasingly Playing a Key Strategic Role Within the Organization, But There is a Mandate to Demonstrate Value. Nearly three-quarters of respondents in our study agree the marketing function is more strategically important to their organization than it used to be, while almost two-thirds agree there’s more pressure than ever to prove the ROI or business performance of their activities. Consumers Expect Brands to Deliver Engaging Experiences Across Highly Fragmented Journeys: Tapad, a part of Experian found that 72% of respondents agree that customers demand more relevant, personalized experiences at the time and place of their choosing. At the same time, 67% of respondents recognize that customer purchase journeys take place over more touchpoints and channels than ever, and 59% of respondents agree that those journeys are less predictable and linear than they once were. Marketing Runs on Data, But the Rules Governing Customer Data Usage are Ever-Evolving: According to the study, 70% of decision-makers agree that consumer data is the lifeblood of their marketing strategies – fueling the personalized, omnichannel experiences customers demand. At the same time, 69% of respondents recognize that customers are increasingly aware of how their data is being used. At least two-thirds agree that data deprecation, including tighter restrictions on data use (66%), as well as operating system and browser changes impacting third-party cookies (68%) means that legacy marketing strategies are unlikely to remain viable in the long-term.“ Our latest survey findings give us a better understanding of how our customers and other companies around the world are trying to master the relationship between people, their data and their devices,” said Mark Connon, General Manager at Tapad, a part of Experian. “This research shows why it's fundamental for the industry to continuously work to develop solutions that are agnostic. Tapad, a part of Experian has worked tirelessly to deliver on this with our Tapad Graph, and by introducing solutions like Switchboard to help the evolving ecosystem and in turn helping customers reap the benefits of better identity in both short and long-term.” The study is founded on an online survey of over 300 decision-makers at global brands and agencies, which was fielded from March to April, 2021. Data deprecation and identity are fast-developing, moving targets, so this study delivers targeted insights and recommendations for how to prepare for coming shifts in customer data strategies – whether they manifest tomorrow or a year from now. Get in touch
Third-party cookies have been a crucial component in people-based advertising and digital identity. With Google's recent announcement of delaying third-party cookie deprecation to 2024, the industry has more time to rethink how to effectively identify and communicate with consumers when the time comes. Preparing for cookie deprecation Solving for the post-cookie world is mission critical, particularly as consumer expectation for a relevant digital experience is heightened. We’ve seen a number of industry participants, including brands, publishers, data providers and technology platforms, work around the clock to find an alternative to third-party cookies—one that amasses the same scale and reach but also maintains consumer privacy. In fact, industry insights echo that sentiment. According to a white paper from Winterberry Group, Collaborative Data Solutions: The Evolution of Identity in a Privacy-First, Post-Cookie World, sponsored in part by Experian, one of the most frequently heard comments was the urgency for the industry to develop post-cookie, privacy compliant solutions that work in a more integrated manner. And if there was one overarching position regarding the research into the future of identity, it’s that collaboration is key. Participants in the white paper expressed that with the elimination of third-party cookies, there will be a surge in collaborative solutions across and within companies to accommodate changes in the digital marketplace. Collaborative data solutions must move beyond new post-cookie identity replacements and encompass more holistic approaches, including first-party data. First-party data sharing Currently, 64.3 percent of organizations in the US collaborate with other organizations to share first-party data for insights, activation, measurement or attribution, and 16.7 percent in the U.S. have plans to. Virtually all US companies surveyed were aware of the option to collaborate with other organizations and expressed openness to discussions around sharing first-party data. What is the solution to third-party cookie deprecation? The deprecation of third-party cookies is creating a shock in the marketing and advertising world because there has been an over-dependence on one type of identifier. Therefore, the solution to identify consumers across the digital ecosystem will not come from a single replacement for third-party cookies. Instead, it will rely on a combination of solutions, including collaborative data between organizations and implementation of proprietary first-party data strategies, as well as a framework that can connect all these touchpoints together. Experian can help you navigate the cookieless future Experian is focused on building a more effective advertising ecosystem that promotes the interoperability of digital touchpoints while enabling and fostering new innovations in a privacy forward way. Contact us today and get started with building connected identity in the ever-changing data landscape. To learn more, watch the recording of our webinar with The Vitamin Shoppe where we discuss identity and how you can drive more addressable audience strategies amidst diminishing data signals. Get in touch
As today’s digital landscape gets more and more complicated there are more ways for brands to connect with users and drive purchases and more ways for ad tech to target and measure those touch points. As in-person shopping picks up steam due to the re-normalization of society post-COVID 19; the connection between digital ads and in-person purchases needs to be made once again. With the rise of Connected TV throughout the pandemic there are even more digital opportunities to target a user. But how do you make sure that those brand engagements are captured and correctly attributed to offline purchases and conversions? The answer lies in a holistic identity resolution strategy. Cross-device identity resolution with The Tapad Graph connects the identifiers and devices of individuals within a household to each other; enabling targeting, frequency capping, extension, segmentation and measurement or attribution between devices; including Connected TV and hashed (privacy-protected) email addresses along with Cookies, Mobile Ad Ids and IP Address. Brands can join their first-party data to The Tapad Graph to execute strategies that connect online and offline data for pre, mid and post-campaign efficiencies. Let’s imagine a scenario in which an outdoor retail brand is targeting users watching specific content on a Connected TV device. Powered by identity resolution, they start with a general ad on CTV and continue targeting down individual paths with each user. When one of them converts in store and makes a purchase; the outdoor retailer can connect that action through location and in-store traffic data with the cross-device identity resolution used to execute the digital campaign. Now the actions of the user online and offline are resolved for more accurate measurement and attribution after the campaign ends. But it doesn’t stop there– the brand's CRM data can be reactivated for the next digital campaign and leveraged to capitalize on the most effective media mix for the user who made the purchase previously. These combined insights can be invaluable in shaping up future campaign strategies with geo-contextual ads, recommended additional products and personalization to help drive more conversions and purchases in-store or online. As in-person shopping picks back up and marketers are tasked once again with balancing online and in-store KPIs, the right identity resolution strategy can unlock necessary efficiencies for retailers, ad tech vendors and agencies tasked with supporting these initiatives. Get in touch