What Happens When You Don’t Have Identity Resolution?

Without identity resolution you run three audiences and cannot say that one person saw all three. It is where Delivr started for me, and it is still the clearest way to see what the missing piece costs.

Three teams, three audiences

I was working on closed-loop attribution for email. Digitally, the process was broken. The social team targeted one audience. The programmatic and display team targeted another. The email team targeted a data-driven audience of its own.

Three audiences means three views of the customer, and no single view that spans them. There was no one person to follow from the ad to the email.

What that costs you

• You cannot say which touch mattered, because you cannot tell that the touches reached the same person.
• A person who already bought can still sit in the audience of any channel that does not know it.
• Each team optimizes its own channel, so the loop never closes.

A real case: Concussion Media

Concussion Media does lead and demand generation, and it had traditionally bought on Meta. Meta's changes to how it handles intent cut Concussion's conversions and raised its cost per qualified lead. Concussion also ran programmatic display through Delivr, so the two channels give a direct comparison.

• Meta: $35 CPM (the price per thousand impressions) and a 1.0% click-through rate, which works out to $3.50 a click.
• Delivr programmatic display: $3.42 CPM and a 0.28% click-through rate, which works out to $1.22 a click.

That is 65% cheaper per click, with two caveats. The click-through rate was lower on Delivr, so the saving comes from the price of the impressions and not from more clicking. And these are costs per click, not costs per lead. What a lead cost and what it was worth is a separate measurement, and I am not putting a number on it here.

After the click, the loop closed. Delivr set the identity on the person when the ad served. It resolved up to 75% of the visitors who bounced, deterministically, and tied them to the qualification questions on the page. Follow-up retargeting emails closed the loop and asked permission to pass the conversion on to the end customer. The result was about 1,000 more leads a month.

One audience instead of three

The thesis is simple: everybody targets the same audience at the same time. You build the audience from your ideal customer profile, B2B, B2C or both, and run it on any tactic or medium. Cost savings follow from running one audience where there were three.

One customer that built a single audience and ran it on every tactic saw its conversion rate rise 3x. I am not naming that customer and I have no baseline to give you, so read it as a direction and not as a benchmark.

Is this you?

• Can you find the same person in the social report, the media report and the email report?
• Do all three teams start from one audience file?
• When someone converts, can you say which of the three reached them first?

If the answer to any of these is no, you are running three audiences. What identity resolution is explains the join that fixes it, and how it changes attribution shows what you can read once it exists. With one audience in place, intent adds the second answer: when a person is ready, and for what. The Unifying Message covers what to say to them.