Merkle Cookie Crumbs: What Marketers Need To Know
As the death of the cookie looms, brands are working to find new ways to reach consumers. Merkle recently announced its collaboration with Tealium to help brands identify target audiences online when that time comes. The partnership has been in place since 2015.
What increases the percentage of a website tag being successful? Gerry Bavaro, chief strategy officer of Merkury, Merkle’s identity resolution and data platform, says it’s the ability to connect offline and online data.
Merkle’s Merkury technology enables cookieless identity for marketers by unifying first-party offline records and digital engagements to one person-based ID.
It is powered by the Merkury ID graph that includes the ability to add up to 10,000 offline attributes such as purchase data, lifestyle identifiers, and demographics and supports a first-party tag on a company’s website.
The data attributed to driving success for each client is different. One financial services client in the credit-card space, for example, drove a 10% conversion-rate lift based on data from Merkle in real-time. The site personalization engine was more predictive, Bavaro said.
The platform looks for the data attributes that over-index.
“It’s not just our consumer data attributes that we test and analyze, but also the page engagement attribution we collect with our tags,” he said. “Our tag, the Mercury DCR tag, is firing in the first-party domain space on the client’s website. It’s not subject to blocking from Apple Safari or the upcoming changes to Google Chrome.”
There are more than 20 events captured on the page, Bavaro said. It knows when a person engages with a certain page or clicked on the newsletter sign up button, as well as notes preferences and interests. That online data, intent and behavior data, combines with offline data to create more accurate audience segments helping predictive models perform better.
Merkle’s tag technology can identify more than 50% of anonymous website visitors as being customers. “It’s usually about 30% more that clients have been able to identify,” he said. “One challenge, most consumers who visit the site are not signed in.”
One benefit for Tealium customers from the partnership extends cookieless addressable media targeting through Merkle’s Merkury platform connecting with Amazon, Google, Facebook, Pandora, Pinterest, Snap, and others.
Any Tealium client also can choose to use Merkle’s prebuilt integrations with demand-side platforms such as The Trade Desk, Google Display & Video 360, OpenX, and other major exchanges. Then there are the more than 40 premium display publishers.
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