At A Glance
AdRoll and Experian help marketers grow the full funnel by combining audience data, identity resolution, and connected TV (CTV) measurement. Marketers can reach new prospects, retarget across screens, and measure CTV's impact on website visits, keeping strategic decisions in human hands as AI takes on more optimization tasks.Key takeaways
- eMarketer forecasts that U.S. advertisers will spend more on connected TV ($17.73 billion) than primetime linear TV ($16.98 billion) in 2026.
- AdRoll’s Household Reach & Site Visit report, built on Experian’s Digital Graph, links CTV exposure to later website visits at the household level.
- Marketers can access Experian Audiences and Experian Audience Engine directly inside AdRoll’s campaign workflow without a separate data integration.
- AdRoll recommends a clear AI framework: people set the what and why, while AI manages the how and how much of campaign execution.
Finding new customers is only part of the challenge. Marketers also need to reach the right people across CTV and digital channels, then understand what happens after the first impression.
Will Nixon, Head of Data Partnerships at AdRoll, joined us to discuss how Experian Audiences and cross-device identity help marketers fill the funnel, prove CTV’s impact on the customer journey, and keep people in charge of strategy as AI takes on optimization.
Reach, accuracy, and proof don’t always move together
Growth marketers must balance scale, relevance, and proof. Layer too many audience segments and reach shrinks; go too broad and relevance suffers. CTV adds a measurement challenge because viewers can’t click the ad, leaving last-click attribution unable to capture the full journey.
That matters as CTV attracts more investment. For the first time, eMarketer forecasts that U.S. advertisers will commit more of their upfront TV budgets to CTV ($17.73 billion) than to primetime linear TV ($16.98 billion) in 2026.
As more budget moves to CTV, the pressure to prove it’s working grows with it. Marketers need to reach the right people consistently, then connect ad exposure to what happens next. That’s where the AdRoll and Experian partnership comes in: Experian’s audience data brings new prospects into the funnel, AdRoll’s long track record in retargeting keeps the conversation moving toward purchase, and a durable identity layer connecting the journey across screens.
Building the funnel on Experian data, inside AdRoll
AdRoll gives marketers access to Experian audience data right inside the campaign workflow, so they can plan and activate campaigns without a separate data integration.
Together, these capabilities help marketers move from understanding an audience to reaching it, then connect campaign activity across devices.
Connecting the big screen to what happens next
CTV gives marketers a powerful way to reach people, but the lack of a click can make it difficult to connect an ad exposure directly with later engagement.
AdRoll’s Household Reach & Site Visit helps marketers connect CTV exposure with later website engagement. Built on our identity graph, the report shows how many households a CTV campaign reached and how many of those households visited the marketer’s website after ad exposure.
That links two parts of the journey: CTV exposure and later website engagement from a digital device in the same household.
“This gives our sellers and our customers confidence to reinvest in CTV, because before this they were a little bit flying blind: we invested in CTV, we ran all these ads, but what was the impact of that? This helps tell that story.”
AdRollWill Nixon, Head of Data Partnerships
Where people stay in charge as AI takes on more campaign optimization
Even with AI handling more of the work, marketers still need to decide who leads and where the technology can help. AdRoll uses a simple framework: people own the what and why, and AI owns the how and how much.
People define the business outcomes and creative guardrails. AI can recommend how to allocate budgets across channels, measure performance, and learn from campaign data. The more of those decisions AI makes, the more data quality, governance, transparency, and marketer control matter.
“Humans own the what and the why: what are we trying to achieve for customers, and why does it matter to them? AI owns the how and how much: how are we going to reach the users, how much are we going to spend on each channel, and how are we going to measure it?”
AdRollWill Nixon, Head of Data Partnerships
This is also why the AdRoll and Experian relationship matters; Experian’s audience data and identity resolution give AdRoll a trusted, well-governed foundation, so marketers can rely on the data behind the how and how much while they stay focused on the what and why.
What this means for your next campaign
If you’re planning a full-funnel program, start with four questions:
Together, AdRoll and Experian help marketers connect audience understanding, activation, identity, and measurement across more of the customer journey.
Ready to grow your funnel with Experian and AdRoll?
Connect with us
Click here to view Experian’s U.S. Consumer Data Privacy Notice.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
About our expert
Will Nixon
Head of Data Partnerships, AdRoll
Will Nixon is the Head of Data Partnerships at AdRoll, where he leads the commercial strategy for the company’s audience targeting and identity data products. A 15-year AdTech veteran, Will also leads supply path optimization strategy at AdRoll, as well as publisher development at Virool and Brand.net. Will also enjoys spending time in the mountains or the ocean while he awaits the 50-year storm.
FAQs
Experian’s Digital Graph connects mobile advertising IDs and CTV IDs to households, giving AdRoll’s Household Reach & Site Visit report the identity layer it needs. This lets marketers see how many households a CTV campaign reached and how many of those households later visited their website, closing a gap that last-click attribution can’t cover.
Experian Audiences are thousands of ready-to-use, syndicated segments covering demographics, financial profiles, intent, interests, and purchase behavior that marketers can select directly inside AdRoll. Experian Audience Engine works differently by letting marketers combine their own first-party data, such as an email list, with Experian’s Marketing Attributes to build a custom modeled audience when a syndicated segment isn’t the right fit.
CTV is harder to measure because viewers can’t click the ad, so last-click attribution models can’t capture the full path to a later action. That’s why household-level identity resolution, like the kind Experian’s Digital Graph provides, is necessary to connect a CTV ad exposure to what a household does next.
Latest posts
Marketers are under more pressure than ever before to prove ROI and efficiency of marketing activities in relation to business performance. On top of that, there are new privacy regulations and uncertainty around what new technologies will have to be implemented in order to replace the granular level targeting and measurement the industry historically has used third-party cookies for. It’s clear marketers are going to need the right tech stack and partners to continue to prove their team’s efficacy. We recently partnered with Forrester Consulting to evaluate the current state of customer data-driven marketing and surveyed over 300 global marketing decision makers at the brand and agency levels. We found that marketing is facing increased demands today, insights from the study include:Consumers expect brands to deliver engaging experiences across highly fragmented journeys. Seventy-two percent of decision-makers reported that customers demand more relevant, personalized experiences at the time and place of their choosing. Marketing runs on data, but the rules governing customer data usage are changing quickly. More than 70% of study participants stated that consumer data is the lifeblood of their marketing strategies, fueling the personalized, omnichannel experiences customers demand. These demands paint a challenging picture. Just as marketers are poised (and tasked) with delivering greater value to their organizations and customers, the ground rules are changing and threatening their ability to deliver. Indeed, 62% of respondents said that the forces of data deprecation will have either a “Significant” (40%) or “Critical” (21%) impact on their marketing strategies over the next two years. Effective identity resolution can help brands prepare for data deprecation challenges Marketers face a daunting landscape, but they can leverage the data, technology, and processes that comprise identity resolution to address business objectives, combat ecosystem complexity, and future-proof customer engagement efforts. By utilizing identity resolution, marketers will be able to match and connect multiple identifiers across devices and touchpoints. This allows for a cohesive, omnichannel view that enables brands to continue to deliver personalized and contextually relevant messages throughout the customer journey and without the use of cookies. The identity graph is the underlying infrastructure that defines connections between the numerous, fluid, and disparate identifiers created during moments of consumer engagement, turning disparate signals into addressable and actionable steps. These connections enable brands to bolster their ability to gain deeper customer insights and power audience building, attribution, and connected measurement. Identity resolution encompasses a wide range of capabilities that support an equally diverse set of marketing use cases. These include the targeting, personalization, and measurement of both known and pseudonymous audiences in the offline and digital worlds, which enables marketers to improve customer data management, drive more effective personalization, and gain insights and efficiencies through measurement across touchpoints. By taking the time to vet the privacy procedures and data collection processes of identity solutions you can reduce your regulatory risk and maintain customer trust. In an open-ended survey response, a marketer shared, “We’ve found that users are willing to volunteer data when they understand what it’s being used for and are asked for clear consent.” Finding the right partners to help navigate the changes The scramble to find an alternative to third-party cookies has slowed down since Google announced they will be delaying their cookie removal until late 2023. However, this gives marketers a unique opportunity to take advantage of the additional time and feel more prepared and confident in their solutions. With the delay, marketers can now test ID solutions and compare apples to apples with data from the third-party cookie while it’s still active and addressable. Test and find a solution that works now, so there are no surprises once cookies have finally made their way out the door in 2023. At Tapad, a part of Experian, we’ve developed a solution that provides agnostic interoperability for the myriad of cookieless identifiers emerging in the market. As a new module in the Tapad Graph, Switchboard will connect traditional digital identifiers to cookieless IDs to support the entire ad ecosystem with privacy-safe future-proof identity resolution. Get in touch
Email hashing was originally intended to be used as an email security feature that has ended up being a very powerful marketing tool. A hashed email is a cryptographic function that changes an email address to a random code which can be used as an anonymous customer identifier. This code is privacy-safe and cannot be traced back to the customer’s email address. However, this hashed email can function like a digital passport that traces every behavior and action a customer takes when logged into an account that is authenticated with an email, making hashed emails a goldmine for customer data. Today emails are used across traditional publishers and within the CTV ecosystem; tying them to more consumer touch points than ever before. Why the emphasis now? Cookies are on their way out the door and have been the primary way that many marketers have tracked their existing and potential customers. In order to replace this granular level of data, marketers are likely going to need multiple solutions. With so many cookieless solutions and IDs appearing in the marketplace, the mapping of the customer journey is bound to be fragmented. Relying on first-party data, such as hashed email, is just one way to reduce that fragmentation; as it can serve as an authenticated starting point for cross-device identity resolution that can be leveraged for targeting, personalization and measurement. How can Tapad + Experian help? Tapad + Experian’s Hashed Email Onboarding is a privacy-safe way to connect consumer email addresses to their related digital devices and other digital identifiers through high precision probabilistic identity. By onboarding hashed emails and incorporating them within your Tapad Graph file you can: Build a more holistic view of individuals and households and their relationship to email addresses in your first-party data set Leverage these relationships for increased cross-device scale for targeting Employ personalization tactics at the household or individual level across devices Create new audience segments and look-alike models for cross-channel activation Design more inclusive measurement and attribution for customer journey mapping Tapad, a part of Experian has built a hashed email onboarding product feature that works with the existing flexibility of The Tapad Graph to deliver the most holistic consumer view, combined with the attributes you need, in the structure that works best for your business objectives. Get in touch
The result of epic shifts from traditional cable to streaming television, the CTV ecosystem is experiencing compounded fragmentation, making it challenging for marketers to leverage in the most effective way for both activation and measurement. Heralded as the hot new household level device for highly engaged viewers, CTV brings massive opportunities for brands to move users down the funnel and incorporate CTV into their attribution modeling post-campaign. Leveraging CTV IDs within a cross-device identity resolution strategy can yield big benefits if you know how to do it right. Check out our breakdown of today’s CTV landscape to help you better understand how and what you can leverage for activation and measurement in the streaming-verse today. Addressability and attribution Not all CTV devices and IDs are addressable; or have ad slots for biddable inventory for advertisers. For example, Apple TV devices and Apple TV + are not ad supported, but could still appear within an identity graph for measurement purposes; helping understand customer behavior and habits, which can inform marketing strategies. Having a household to individual view that’s as inclusive as possible can provide valuable insights. CTV identity strategy Whether or not CTV devices or apps are addressable for advertisers, they can bring immense value when leveraged as part of a holistic identity resolution strategy. As a household level device with user authentication it can provide marketers a top-down view; unlocking household:individual targeting opportunities and unification of IDs at both levels for frequency management and customer journey mapping Get started with us Tapad, part of Experian, offers CTV ID onboarding and extension to our CTV ID Universe as a part of The Tapad Graph suite of products.