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?
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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
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
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. 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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. 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