Understanding Audience Match Rates

RetentionX integrates with major advertising platforms such as Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, and Pinterest. Whenever you push a segment to one of these platforms, RetentionX automatically creates a ready-to-use audience.

As you work with these audiences— whether you target them directly, exclude them from campaigns, or use them to build lookalike audiences—it’s important to understand how many customers are actually available to the ad platform. In other words, how many customers from your RetentionX segment are included in the audience.

To assess this correctly, you should focus on audience size, not match rate. Match rates can be misleading and may lead to false conclusions. Here's why.

How Audience Creation Works

After creating a customer segment in RetentionX, you can initiate audience creation for a connected ad platform. RetentionX then automatically creates the corresponding audience in the selected ad account.



To do this securely, RetentionX uses hashing, a cryptographic method that converts customer data into randomized, unreadable values before they are sent to the ad platform. The platform then compares these hashed values with its own data. Once the audience is created, all hashed data (matched or unmatched) is deleted.

By nature, not every customer can be identified on every platform. To maximize the number of customers that can be recognized, RetentionX sends multiple identifiers per customer. For example, a customer may not use the same email address for their Facebook account, but may still be identifiable via their phone number.

The following properties are used for matching:

• Meta: Email, phone number
• Google: Email, phone number, address
• TikTok: Email, phone number
• Pinterest: Email, phone number

What is Match Rate?

After an audience is created, you can view its audience size. In the audience details, you’ll also see a match rate, which represents the percentage of shared data points that were successfully matched by the platform.

The matching process evaluates each individual customer property (such as email or phone number) and attempts to match it against the platform’s database. While this metric is intended to give an indication of reachability, it does not represent how many customers from your segment were actually included in the audience.

The Challenge with Match Rate

It's important to be careful when assessing the match rate as it does not tell you what percentage of segment members were actually identified, but rather, the percentage of the data points that could potentially be matched - and that's a big difference! 

Let’s take a look at a simplified example:

Let's say you've created a segment that identifies only one customer, Sarah— because she's the only one who meets your segment criteria. Once the segment is used to create an audience in e.g. Google Ads, RetentionX pushes 3 data points (email, phone number and mailing address) with the goal that at least one of them can be used by Google to identify Sarah in their own database.

Let’s say Sarah could not be identified via her email address or mailing address, but her phone number was successfully matched. In this case, 100% of the customers in the segment would be included in the audience, even though the match rate is only 33%.

RetentionX’s matching strategy ultimately ensures more customers are identified, even if the match rate percentage appears to be lower. So don't worry if your match rates appear to be lower— always take a look at the audience size, as that's the real measurement of success. 

Not using RetentionX yet?