Five steps to maximize your first-party data strategy with The Trade Desk

As marketers seek new ways to reach their target audiences and build consumer loyalty in the wake of sweeping changes to data collection and advertising use cases, we’re evolving our tool kit to help advertisers leverage their first-party data. These updates will help you extend your first-party data across identifiers with precision and address your needs in a future without cookies.

First-party data is information that a brand or web property owner collects directly from users who visit their site. In today’s digital ecosystem, this can include cookies, mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), Connected TV (CTV) IDs, and IP addresses. These unique, pseudonymous identifiers are generated in several ways, but a few of the more common ones include a user visiting a website, using an app on their mobile phone, or streaming content. For brands with point-of-sale online, first-party data also includes customer relationship management (CRM) data like a postal address, phone number, and most commonly, an email address. CRM data can connect purchases on- and offline and help brands retain customers and grow their loyalty.

Given the growing importance of first-party data and its increasing complexity in a changing digital environment, here are five easy steps to maximize it.

First-party data is a foundational part of future-proofing as cookies and other identifiers become scarcer. With privacy and consent also becoming more important, data — like first-party cookies — is invaluable to maintain connections to consumers. And CRM email data can be an important step toward preparing for a more durable, cookie-less environment.

Today, many brands have a bigger digital footprint than they realize. Make sure you’re using all available data, including first-party cookies, MAIDs (a unique identifier tied to a mobile phone device), partner IDs (like LiveRamp’s RampID), and especially email. In addition to supporting advertisers in future-proofing, email has become a connective identifier across the open internet, CTV, point-of-purchase, and customer retention programs. Prioritize growing your first-party emails to build a foundation for identity-driven strategies of the future. Create an email database by expanding customer communication through newsletters or by gating website content and checkout experiences.

Emails can help build a cookie-less foundation for targeting and measurement by being converted into pseudonymous identifiers such as Unified ID 2.0 (UID2). UID2 can be used to reach audiences across the open internet, mobile environments, and CTV. By leveraging UID2 today, advertisers are building their cookie-less foundation and helping to further incentivize adoption of UID2 for the entire ecosystem. Using our platform enables cross-platform strategies, including the fast-growing CTV, where email is also used for authentication. The great news: UID2-based audiences can be targeted between display and CTV with cross-platform frequency capping and measurement in one platform.

Collecting email data is only the first step. With our CRM onboarding, emails can be translated to UID2 for omnichannel activation. Then advertisers can apply our Identity Alliance and layer on lookalike modeling for additional cross-identifier and cross-device reach. Identity Alliance can extend your reach to new audiences using cookies, MAIDs, CTV IDs, and other partner IDs to supplement UID2 and leverage all available identifiers, maximizing scale. This is essential for smarter, more effective targeting and measurement in an increasingly fragmented ecosystem.

Marketers are connecting more consumer touchpoints and digital identifiers than ever before, making interoperable solutions and platforms essential to creating the most holistic view. To support these efforts with UID2, we are launching integrations with top customer data platforms (CDPs), data management platforms (DMPs), and clean rooms to better facilitate privacy-conscious audience creation and audience extension for our advertisers. Advertisers can unify their measurement providers and third-party data solutions through UID2 within these platforms and more seamlessly onboard audiences for activation within our platform. We’ve already announced our integration with Adobe’s Real-Time CDP, and there’s much more to come!

For more information about first-party data activation and CRM onboarding with us, contact your account manager. Learn more about how to take full advantage of your CRM data with Adobe.