At A Glance
First-party data for commerce media networks (CMNs) provides a direct connection to shopper behavior that advertisers value. But logged-in users and loyalty members only tell part of the story. Connecting fragmented identities and adding context beyond the observed behaviors can help CMNs turn more of the data they already own into consumer intelligence that works across media channels, while keeping their customer relationships at the center.Key takeaways
- First-party data can leave coverage gaps between the shoppers a CMN knows and the audiences it can consistently recognize and reach.
- Experian’s identity resolution and enrichment solutions help commerce media networks connect fragmented signals and add context beyond the direct customer relationship.
- CMNs can focus on closing their first-party data gaps and building a more complete view of their consumers. Our neutral approach helps them activate and measure campaigns across platforms without building separate integrations for every partner, while giving them the flexibility to work with their preferred technology and media partners.
Owning first-party data gives CMNs a strong foundation. The next step is connecting shopper data across customer relationship management (CRM), digital, and TV. Identity resolution helps CMNs link interactions across channels so they can recognize and reach consumers more consistently.
Media networks know what people browse and buy, loyalty programs create direct customer relationships, and transaction data gives advertisers a valuable connection between media and commerce. But logged-in and loyalty data rarely represent every shopper interaction. CMNs need to connect these signals to build a more complete view of their consumers and put that insight into action.
A shopper might research a product anonymously on mobile, buy it in-store without using a loyalty account, and then return using a different email address. By connecting these interactions, CMNs can build a more complete view of their consumers and better understand how shoppers engage across channels.
Multiply that across millions of interactions, and the challenge grows. Guest transactions can sit outside loyalty profiles, identifiers change, and shoppers move between stores, websites, apps, and devices. A CMN may have plenty of first-party data and still see only part of its audience.
The addressability gap starts inside the data
CMNs face an addressability gap when disconnected shopper data limits their ability to recognize and reach consumers beyond their own properties. Connecting loyalty profiles, transactions, and digital identifiers helps CMNs extend their reach across connected TV (CTV), social, and programmatic media.
Market concentration makes that challenge more pressing. Amazon and Walmart will capture more than 81% of U.S. off-site retail media ad spending in 2027. Their large logged-in audiences and extensive commerce data give them an advantage. Other CMNs can compete by making better use of the shopper data they already have.
Identity resolution helps CMNs close the addressability gap by connecting logins, devices, email addresses, and transactions to consistent consumer and household identities. This helps CMNs recognize shoppers across channels and reach more of their audience.
Our neutral infrastructure helps CMNs use that identity foundation across their preferred technology and media partners. They can build on existing investments, strengthen cross-platform addressability, and maintain flexibility without relying on a single provider.
A transaction tells you what happened, not the whole story
CMNs can build more valuable audiences for advertisers by enriching their first-party shopper data with deeper consumer insights. This helps them improve audience segmentation, strengthen their advertising offerings, and create more opportunities to generate revenue.
Purchase data reveals what shoppers buy, but it doesn’t always explain who they are or what else matters to them. A retailer may know that someone buys organic groceries every week or recently purchased paint and power tools. Two shoppers who bought the same product may represent very different audiences for advertisers.
Experian’s Enrichment capabilities help CMNs look beyond transactions by appending demographic and behavioral attributes from Experian Marketing Data to their first-party shopper data. These additional insights help CMNs refine segmentation, inform modeling, and create more relevant audiences for advertisers. With richer consumer insights, CMNs can turn transaction data into more valuable advertising offerings, helping them create new revenue opportunities while maintaining their direct shopper relationships.
Keep first-party data connected across media
CMNs can get more value from their first-party data by keeping consumer identities and audience definitions consistent across media channels. Connecting shopper signals and adding consumer context helps them build audiences they can activate, collaborate with advertisers, and measure across platforms.
Keeping audiences consistent across media channels can be challenging as CMNs move between platforms and partners. Audiences can lose scale when they reach another environment, and differences in how partners recognize consumers can create gaps in activation and measurement.
Our neutral infrastructure helps CMNs keep their first-party data connected across their preferred technology and media partners. They can maintain control over their data and identity, build on existing investments, and avoid relying on a single provider.
Experian helps CMNs strengthen their first-party data foundation for use across existing systems and media channels. With our identity resolution and offline identity append capabilities, CMNs can share first-party data with us to connect disparate records to individuals and households and add missing offline identifiers. We then return the data so CMNs can use it across their existing systems and preferred partners.
By keeping first-party data connected across media, CMNs can extend the value of their shopper relationships, support advertiser campaigns, and make better use of their existing technology investments.
More addressable data creates more places to grow
Connecting shopper data across media helps CMNs expand their addressable audiences and create more advertising opportunities.
A more complete, addressable audience can give advertisers more ways to use first-party data that makes a CMN distinct. It can help networks extend those audiences beyond owned-and-operated properties into CTV, social, programmatic, and other environments where shoppers spend their time.
CMNs can build on their existing technology investments by improving the quality and consistency of their first-party data. With a stronger identity foundation, they can better understand their customers, activate audiences across channels, and measure campaign outcomes.
CMNs can strengthen their advertising offerings by turning more of their existing shopper data into audiences advertisers can reach across channels. By recognizing more consumers across channels and building more relevant audiences, they can create additional media opportunities for advertisers while keeping their first-party data at the center of their business.
Our neutral infrastructure helps CMNs extend the value of their first-party data across media environments while maintaining control over their customer relationships, technology investments, and partner choices.
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About the author
Colleen Dawe
VP, Advertiser Partnerships
Colleen Dawe is VP, Advertiser Partnerships at Experian Marketing Services, where she oversees revenue growth and client success, helping advertisers harness data and identity to fuel marketing strategies. With over 15 years of experience spanning TV and digital media, she brings deep expertise in data, identity, activation, and measurement to help her clients connect innovation with business outcomes.
FAQs
The first-party data gap for CMNs is the difference between the shopper data a CMN owns and the first-party data it can consistently connect and use. Anonymous interactions, disconnected identifiers, and incomplete customer records can leave part of the shopper relationship outside a CMN’s addressable audience.
CMNs can use identity resolution to connect fragmented shopper signals and enrichment to add relevant context beyond the direct customer relationship. Neutral infrastructure helps them put that consumer intelligence to work across activation and measurement, using their existing technology and preferred partners to extend reach and improve outcomes.
Neutral infrastructure gives CMNs greater control over how they use their customer data and identity across platforms, partners, and channels. Neutral infrastructure that integrates with existing workflows can help a network expand addressability, preserve choice, and adapt its media strategy without rebuilding its customer data foundation whenever its needs change.
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. 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