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
Experian Marketing Services and Data Quality President Genevieve Juillard recently sat down with Zach Rodgers, host of the AdExchanger Talks podcast to discuss the future of identity, the importance of data transparency and privacy, and our recent acquisition of Tapad. Genevieve focused on the opportunity for our industry to reimagine an advertising ecosystem that is resilient and adaptable; one that takes advantage of emerging data and prioritizes data transparency and consumer privacy. She also discussed the importance of advertising strategies that put consumers at the heart of every decision and give them more control over their data. Genevieve shared with AdExchanger that Experian’s acquisition of Tapad, a global leader in digital identity resolution, was a natural fit for our company. Tapad’s approach and role in the ecosystem is very much aligned with Experian’s, which is to develop solutions that are resilient to industry and consumer changes. The combination of our capabilities supports interoperability across all types of identifiers, both online and offline, and will position us to help our clients navigate the post-third-party cookie world. To learn more about Experian’s plans to support an effective advertising ecosystem that will evolve with our dynamic industry, listen to the full podcast Embracing ‘Healthy Fragmentation’ In Ad Tech, With Genevieve Juillard. Get in touch
It’s been over a year since Google announced they’d be deprecating the third-party cookie and in that time there’s been a major focus on two types of cookieless identity solutions. Identity vendors and marketers are strategizing which of these two future solutions best fits their needs so they can achieve privacy-safe scale once third-party cookies are no longer available for use on Chrome. Let’s break down these solutions and the considerations marketers need to take into account when deciding what partners to move forward with in the future of identity resolution. Authenticated Traffic Solutions Authenticated traffic solutions (ATS) are a type of digital identification that asks the end-user to identify themselves via personal information, most commonly email address. Often, you’ll see self-authentication at the point of entry to a website that asks you to create an account or login immediately to access the content you are seeking. E-commerce sites use authentication to keep track of consumer purchases and inform advertising decisions for that customer; and publishers use it to tailor featured content, or, more importantly for this discussion, leverage it within the ad ecosystem for targeting. While authentication can provide very valuable user data for audience segmenting and targeting, it can be limited in scale for a single publisher to leverage and monetize on their own. That’s why some identity vendors have worked to integrate themselves within as many publisher authentication modules as possible, so that they can create an aggregate of scale for the ad ecosystem to tap into. But, even this isn’t going to deliver the reach marketers truly thirst for. Alternatively, Facebook has the scale for authenticated traffic, but they keep their data inside a walled garden, so the utility of those authenticated users is only valuable within the Facebook ecosystem. So how can authenticated traffic solutions increase scale to broaden the scope of identifiers they can collect and leverage? Hint: a few of the biggest players have already figured it out. It’s the single sign-on. Google is probably the largest purveyor of a single-sign on solution that can directly impact advertising capabilities. Can you think of a site you visit that doesn’t offer a sign-in with your existing Google account? It’s a short list. Google has integrated themselves into so many applications and publishers that “Login with Gmail” is just second nature (you pictured the Gmail logo when you read that, didn’t you?). Now, if you’re about to purchase something you found off an Instagram ad, or perhaps a retailer you buy from regularly, you’ve probably noticed options to proceed with your checkout via “Amazon pay” or “Apple pay”. These are also single-sign ons. You’re authenticating yourself through Amazon or Apple to that retailer in exchange for A- the safety and security that Amazon or Apple provide for your financial information and B- skipping the annoying process of manually entering personal information over and over again at point of sale. It’s starting to sound like there’s a lot of authenticated data out there isn’t it? Well, that’s true, but again, Amazon and Apple are walled gardens. Amazon is working diligently to build out their own ecosystem to leverage their content and retail channel data for a holistic offering. And Apple keeps user data very close to the chest, constantly limiting its utility for themselves and advertisers. So what is identity resolution doing about it? The Trade Desk announced their solution; Unified ID 2.0, which promises to leverage email authenticated identity for a truly scaled solution for publishers via Javascript through Prebid. By handing over UID2.0 to an independent unbiased organization like Prebid, The Trade Desk is creating instant scale and trust in their solution. Unauthenticated Traffic Solutions Unlike ATS, unauthenticated traffic solutions do not rely on a log-in to identify a user, but they also don’t rely on third-party cookies. Instead, unauthenticated solutions (UATS) leverage their existing streams of real-time data through Javascript on publisher sites or an SDK (software development kit used by apps). The type of information UATS solutions can collect via Javascript or SDK vary, but it can include IP address, user agent and device level info. But being able to read this information at the point of entry to a website does not make a quality identifier. The best unauthenticated solutions will have the ability to set or ingest this information into a unique ID through an infrastructure with incredibly fast speed that can process trillions of anonymous data signals across multiple channels and devices. And even more so, be able to interpret those signals into a profile using machine learning– all at the moment a user enters a domain. It sounds complicated because it is, but it also has a lot of potential. The identity space cannot rest solely on authenticated traffic solutions, because, as you can see, it could limit ownership and operability to just a few power players/walled gardens. This doesn’t help the larger ecosystem monetize and personalize ad inventory. The right unauthenticated solution, however, can unify cross-device individuals and households at scale, because they’re integrated on the broadest number of publishers/SDKs across platforms, have the best algorithms to build confident connections between identifiers, and are universally transactable across the most common sell and demand side platforms. Think of it as the perfect partner- speaking a common language that everyone in the ecosystem understands and acts on. Today more than twenty cookieless identifiers are available in market for the ad ecosystem, and Google hasn’t even announced a date of deprecation. It’s important to be on the lookout for differentiators like scale and precision. Most importantly, choosing a truly cross-device partner will be key, especially as more digital devices and IDs grow in adoption, like CTV has this past year. Taking advantage of both What we will come to find, once the third-party cookie is obsolete, is that choosing just one of these solution types, or partners, will be a disadvantage. The more the industry comes together to collaborate on solutions, the more apparent it is that both of them have value, and thus employing both solutions will give marketers the best opportunities. Tapad, now part of Experian, recently announced the launch of Switchboard; a module within our identity solution; The Tapad Graph, to create this agnostic interoperability for identifiers of all types, and choice and control for the ad tech vendors and marketers who want them. By instantly creating the ability to partner with multiple solutions, Tapad + Experian is ensuring that all use cases for the third-party cookie live on in our cookieless future. Get in touch
Tapad launches global privacy-safe solution to provide continuity in the absence of third-party cookies Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, will connect emerging cookieless identifiers to traditional IDs, creating a more holistic view of the consumer and driving value exchange within the advertising ecosystem Tapad, part of Experian, a global leader in cross-device digital identity resolution, and a part of Experian, announced today the launch of Switchboard, a first-of-its-kind solution to help navigate the evolving cookieless landscape. Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, will operate as a global, privacy-safe solution to provide continuity in the absence of third-party cookies by connecting new cookieless identifiers to traditional digital IDs for a comprehensive view of consumers and their digital touchpoints. Switchboard will enable interoperability across the growing number of these digital identifiers and the value exchange between publishers, content creators and consumers. Leading digital identity solutions partnering with Tapad, part of Experian at the launch of Switchboard include Unified ID 2.0, ID5, Lotame Panorama ID, BritePool, Retargetly IDx and Audigent Halo ID. Tapad, part of Experian plans to expand support to additional identity solutions on an ongoing basis. In addition to these identity solutions, early partners across the ecosystem include The Trade Desk, Amobee, Martin, ShareThis, Eyeota and Catalina. “This diverse group of launch partners and testing customers will prove that Switchboard is an important tenet for the future of identity resolution. We’re excited to be proactive in our approach to give marketers time to adapt new solutions and test their function in tandem with the third-party cookie, while continuing to give our customers flexibility and control,” said Mark Connon, General Manager of Tapad, part of Experian. “Facilitating access and usage of 1st party identifiers is crucial to help marketers prepare for the cookieless future. Thanks to Switchboard, ID5's cookieless IDs will be available to a wider audience of brands and agencies and enable them to run effective, data-driven campaigns beyond the third-party cookie,” said Mathieu Roche Co-founder & CEO of ID5. Switchboard provides value across the marketing and advertising ecosystem as the need for the ability to support multiple cookieless ID’s across ad tech increases throughout 2021. With a decade of expertise creating digital identity resolution products, Tapad, part of Experian is poised to solve this challenge through innovation and quality, privacy-safe data-driven solutions. “Interoperability is paramount for brand marketers, agencies, publishers and platforms if we want to support an open and free Internet and break free of the stranglehold of walled gardens,” said Pierre Diennet, Global Partnerships at Lotame. ”Lotame Panorama ID’s participation in Switchboard reflects our steadfast commitment to collaborating across and within the industry and providing value to all of its players.” “As advertisers continue to contemplate the future of identity, Amobee is proud to partner with Tapad, part of Experian on this next-generation solution to provide a comprehensive view of consumers,” says Bryan Everett, Senior Vice President of Global Business Development at Amobee. “With the imminent loss of cookies, advertisers must think creatively in order to respectfully engage consumers in a privacy-compliant way and Switchboard can play an important role in addressing their respective identity needs.” Tapad, part of Experian is welcoming identity solutions and Tapad Graph customer participation in Switchboard throughout 2021. Stayed tuned for more updates and information on Switchboard in the coming months. Get in touch