What is deterministic data and how does it resolve user identities in marketing?

The average U.S. consumer has access to over ten connected devices in their household, and they can use any combination of them each day. 

Unifying customer data creates a challenge for marketers trying to deliver a consistent, personalized experience across various channels.

With Lytics Decision Engine, marketers can use graph databases and deterministic first-party data to resolve user identities and create a better customer experience. Before diving into Lytics unique graph databases, let’s quickly review what deterministic data is. 

What is deterministic data?

Deterministic data, or first-party data,  is data provided by customers such as email address, name, or account number. Since this data is given by users, we know this data is 100% accurate. Because deterministic matching is reliable, it can be used to create granular audience segments that marketers can activate in their downstream tools. 

For example, let’s say a shopper checks out on your online store, they give your brand their deterministic data including:

• Name
• Address
• Email address
• Phone number
• Date of birth
• Credit card number

Towards the end of the transaction, the shopper decides to create an account number to make checking out faster for future purchases. The next time the user visits your site and logs in with their account number, your brand can identify that it’s the same profile with 100% accuracy.

How digital advertisers use deterministic data

Deterministic data is also collected from contact forms, content download forms, and social media accounts. In digital advertising, deterministic data is used to track identified users’ activity across different sites and apps for ad targeting. For instance, a user’s identity can be resolved when the email address provided by a publisher matches the email address in a graph database of a logged-in user.  

Deterministic matching vs Probabilistic matching

Lytics Decision Engine uses deterministic matching within its customer data platform and supports probabilistic matching you perform in your data warehouse. Unlike deterministic matching, probabilistic matching uses statistics to measure the probability of two user profiles representing the same person. For example, if a publisher wants to determine if a non-logged in site visitor is the same person as a known ID, they can use probabilistic data to guess if it’s a match. 

Lytics Decision Engine’s unique approach to deterministic audience matching

Lytics Decision Engine stitches data from various sources into a single customer profile using “bridge identifiers”. Deterministic matching looks for an exact match between two pieces of data, usually an email, account number, or date of birth. For example, if a user has a customer ID and an email in their CRM, then Lytics can combine the profile into one profile even if the user uses a device where their email address can’t be found.  

Deterministic graph use cases & marketing applications  

Lytics Decision Engine uses first-party, deterministic audience graphs that allow brands to connect user demographics, interest(content affinities), behaviors(devices) and location. Graph databases are ideal for building customer identity graphs to capture and link billions of interconnected relationships to support the following use cases.

Popular use cases for deterministic graphs include:

• Finding out the interests of a specific user by tracking their time spent and purchases made across various devices

• Identifying and targeting your brand’s visitors based on their past behavior on the website

• Creating specific audience segments by using deterministic methodologies to categorize users more accurately

• Giving your customers a more personalized ad experience by analyzing their prior interests on specific sites

• Gaining insights into a customer’s entire journey from their initial contact with your brand to their first purchase

• Discovering common characteristics of people who purchase certain products to create lookalike models and find users who are the most similar to your best customers

Marketing applications of deterministic graphs:

• Provide a more personalized customer service experience. Because deterministic graphs link data from various sources, your customer service team has access to the information they need to resolve customer queries faster and more efficiently.

• Make more data-driven decisions when creating budgets for their various marketing channels. Since customers interact with a brand over multiple channels, deterministic graphs help you to link device ids to a user profile, in turn allowing you to better understand the role of each channel for conversion activity.

Lytics Decision Engine helps you provide relevant content in 3 steps

1. Collect your first-party data. The first step to creating an effective deterministic audience graph is to collect your first-party data using your CDP. This data provides insights from demographic indicators such as age and education levels to predictive behavior like how users interact with your brand on different devices. All of this data allows you to begin building complete customer profiles.

2. Link your data to customer identities. Next, Lytics’ graph database model helps you make connections by linking that first-party data to every instance of your customers’ identities. This data solution gives you a big picture view of your users by connecting their activity across all marketing channels, devices, browsers, and households.

3. Create targeted and personalized customer experiences. Now, with this data and connections, Lytics’ deterministic audience graphs will package your customer information so that you can determine better audience targeting to create a personalized advertising experience for your users. You can identify and reach the right customers and build more meaningful segments.

By mapping customer journeys and gaining insights into how effective different strategies are with various users and across every channel, you can create a personalized experience that leads to conversions.

For a more in-depth view of how Lytics’ graph database model works, take a look at this breakdown of our identity resolution process.

Try Lytics free for 30 days to see how our graph database model can give you up-to-date, accurate insights into your customers’ behaviors and attributes.