Understanding Audience Match Rates

RetentionX integrates with your advertising platforms Google, Meta, TikTok, and Pinterest, automatically creating ready-to-use audiences whenever a segment is pushed to the desired platform. Of course, as you work with these audiences by either targeting them directly, excluding them from your campaigns or using them to create lookalike audiences, it's valuable to understand how many customers are being identified by the marketing platform, i.e. how many of the customers that belong to the segment in RetentionX are also part of the audience. In order to understand this, it's important to assess the audience size - not the match rates - as these can lead to false conclusions. Here's why!

How Audience Creation Works

After creating a customer segment that you would like to work with, you can initiate the audience creation. RetentionX then automatically creates an audience in the respective ads account (e.g. Google Ads). To do this, RetentionX uses hashing, a cryptographic security method that converts the customer data into randomized code, before the ad platform receives it. Google then uses this hashed information and compares it with its own. As soon as the custom audience has been created, the hashed data (with and without a match) is deleted. 

By nature, not every customer can be identified by a connected profile or account associated with the platform. To maximize the number of customers that can be identified by the marketing platform, RetentionX not only sends the email address but multiple data points - as a customer might have a Facebook profile using a different email address, but the same phone number.

The following properties are used to map customers: 

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

What is Match Rate?

After the audiences are created, you're able to assess the audience size. Under the audience details you'll also find the information of the match rate that calculates the percentage of successfully matched data points from all data shared with the platform. 

The matching process considers each individual customer property within the given segment, and attempts to find matches for each property within its own database. While this metric is designed to help brands understand how many of their customers can successfully be reached within each platform, there are times when this metric can be deceiving. 

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. 

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