LiveRamp adds people-based search targeting to IdentityLink

Let’s say you’re a Honda auto dealer in Boston, and you want to target some of your previous and current customers with a new sale of Honda CRVs.

One way is via Google AdWords, since you can show an ad for your sale, along with the results for searches like “Honda CRV” or “new car sales,” for people in New England.

Using Google Customer Match, you can also target your previous and current customers, if you have their Gmail addresses and they are logged into that Gmail at the time of the search. Google can also sometimes match the customer to a Gmail address if you enter another email address for that customer.

But some car customers don’t provide their email addresses, so as to avoid spam. Or they might provide, say, an email address that Google can’t handle. That means that only part of the Honda dealer’s customer relationship management (CRM) data can be utilized for AdWords targeting via search.

That’s a use case for LiveRamp’s new people-based search targeting for its IdentityLink, announced today. At launch, the new targeting is designed specifically for the search engine giant, Google.

IdentityLink provides profiles of actual people, with personally identifiable information. It is used for cross-device matching, so marketers can tell which actual people own which devices, and it’s used for other kinds of targeted marketing. LiveRamp is the data on-boarding and identity resolution service of data service Acxiom.

But, CMO Jeff Smith told me, it hasn’t been used for search marketing, till now.

The Honda dealer can go to LiveRamp and onboard their CRM data, and LiveRamp can add the email addresses for the people in that customer data who are also in its database.

LiveRamp may be able to identify Gmail addresses for many customers, which can be used for targeting directly. Or LiveRamp might identify other email addresses, which Google might be able to correlate with Gmail addresses, since users sometimes employ other email addresses on Google properties, such as YouTube.

Smith said this allows marketers to target their customers or former customers at scale in search-based marketing, up to six times more customers than otherwise.

LiveRamp says its early testing of this people-based search has lifted click-through rates on ads by 2-3 percent, and improved Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) by nearly 70 percent.