Sunday, August 12, 2018

LiveRamp and Audience Manager Integration

Digital marketers since the onset, have strived to deliver personalized and targeted content to users. That coupled with knowing where users are in the purchase funnel and showing tailored content across multiple devices and channels is what makes their experience truly omni-channel. There's another term coined for this type marketing and it's called People-based marketing. So, how is it all accomplished? 

The following visual shows the various steps involved in delivering a truly unified experience to users across multiple channels and devices. One of the steps we'll cover as part of this post is to do a deep dive on the process of data on boarding.



Data on boarding (step 2) is the process of taking in customer's offline personally identifiable information (PII) and anonymizing it to make it available for online digital marketing efforts. Companies such as LiveRamp specialize in ingesting PII and device/cookie data from various sources and sharing it with Data Management Platforms for further activation. Typically, clients who are unable to connect their customer's hashed profile ID upon authentication with AAM (natural match) leverage LiveRamp but other customers leverage data onboarding as well. Let's dive into how data is shared between LiveRamp and Adobe Audience Manager:

LiveRamp to Adobe Audience Manager


Clients have often asked me how does LiveRamp send data to AAM and how is LiveRamp able to take PII data and anonymize it. At a high level, customers share their CRM data such as email address with LiveRamp which is translated into cookies and device IDs. For AAM, that cookie is the third party UUID that LiveRamp maintains a match table with and provides a batch file that's uploaded to AAM thereby enabling activation in the DMP.

Let's take a look at the various steps involved in bringing LiveRamp data in AAM.
  • Create 3 Data Sources: The first step to create three data sources for taking in LiveRamp data from cookies, iOS IDFA and Android Google IDs. The iOS and Android data sources are created in a similar way and the Cookie data source is created slightly differently as shown below. Please note that these data sources are only created once and can be replicated for all future file based on boarding.



  • Create 3 On Boarded Traits: The next step is to create on boarded traits in AAM based on the 10 digit numeric integration code (ic) provided by LiveRamp for each uploaded (file) set of cookies & device IDs. Please note that for each upload or data point, we are supposed to use the same integration code to create these traits. The following screenshot shows an example of a trait that's created to tie uploaded Android device Id data from LiveRamp to AAM. Make sure to create three flavors of these traits tied to each data source (iOS, Android and Cookies).

  • LiveRamp to upload data to AAM (S3 or FTP): Once all the relevant data sources (can be reused) and onboarded traits are created, the LiveRamp contact will push UUIDs or device IDs to AAM via a batch file process.
  • Monitor Onboarding Status Report: The last step is to monitor the Onboarding Status report and onboarded traits in AAM to validate if the LiveRamp uploads are setup correctly.

Finally, once data has been successfully onboarded from LiveRamp, you can map these traits into segments and then to various AAM destinations for marketing activation.

Audience Manager to LiveRamp

Almost all scenarios involving LiveRamp deal with data being onboarded to a DMP, but there is a way to send Audience Manager segments back to LiveRamp as well. That is made possible with the Server to Server (S2S) integration that AAM has with LiveRamp where UUIDs and mobile IDs are sent back to LiveRamp. A use case for that is propensity modeling where customers take in "enriched" audiences originally shared from LiveRamp to AAM back into their CRM system for further optimization and enrichment. 

To summarize, we covered what role LiveRamp plays in anonymizing customer's PII data, how that data is shared with activation platforms and how it flows back into the CRM for further enrichment. I would like to hear about how you're leveraging data on boarded to a DMP back into your own CRM system.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi.

Great post man I appreciate it. I have gained so much knowledge. Can you please shed a light on server-to-server calls as well? How do those interactions work and billed ? thank you

Rohan Kapoor said...

Thanks for the question. The Server to server integration/destination is not charged directly in AAM but LiveRamp may charge depending on how they onboard these audiences on their end.
Rohan

Anonymous said...

Hello,

This was helpful. Perhaps you can clarify something for me. If an MVPD (cable operator) sends their hashed subscriber data to Liveramp, while simultaneously the Marketer with whom the MVPD is working with, sends Liveramp their data in order for Liveramp to make a match, would you know if the marketer is sending to Liveramp addresses + attribute data? If it is just addresses and Liveramp connects it to MVPD subscriber data, where is the connection of attributes made? Does Liveramp send it to Adobe for that and then Adobe sends it back?

Hopefully, I am making sense!

Rohan Kapoor said...

That's a good question and based on my experience working on Liveramp's integration with Audience Manager, my guess would be that the marketer will upload the common ID enriched with additional attributes and sent it to Audience Manager. That's because in AAM, the marketer can combine these attributes with other sources of data and then activate them directly via the DMP. Hope it makes sense but if it's not the case, please let me know so that I can correct my understanding.

Ambika Tewari said...

Hi Rohan,
One of our client wants to send same data to LiveRamp and AAM simultaneously. Can you advise what could be the possible usecases that can be achieved through this ?

Rohan Kapoor said...

Hello Ambika,
It will be hard to answer your question without knowing about this exact scenario but LiveRamp helps customers find their users across multiple properties and touch points based on PII data and match them to AAM cookies in order to increase their overall reach for advertising purposes.
You typically onboard AAM based from your own CRM to add demographic information to AAM to supplement your onsite behavioral data for onsite personalization.
Hope this helps.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Rohan for all the details. One thing I'm not clear is how liveramp's publisher/supply side integration works? does it follow the same route of publisher uploading the PII data and liveramp creating IDL for them?

Unknown said...

LiveRamp has integrations with several DSP's. Question is -what's the real use of DMP like Adobe Audience Manager, when I can use LiveRamp to activate my audiences across multiple DSP's using LiveRamp's connect.

Rohan Kapoor said...

@Unknown, the biggest advantage a DMP like AAM has over LiveRamp is that there's an OOTB integration between AAM and Adobe Analytics so collecting user behavioral data is easily taken care of. Aside from that, AAM has a number of people based destinations which help clients reach their customers without needing cookies. I believe LR has that capability too but what sets AAM apart is its integration with other Adobe solutions especially if they use the Adobe suite.

@Anonymous: I'm not an export on LiveRamp but I believe it works the same way where they resolve PII to actual users (A LR expert should confirm this). Having said that, I know LR has a service called ATS which leverages authenticated IDs so given that 3P cookies may not exist, LR will probably push its customers to move to this model more.