The 5 Types of User Matching Challenges
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WHITE PAPER THE 5 TYPES OF USER MATCHING CHALLENGES AND HOW TO SOLVE THEM Cross-Device Cross-Channel Cross-Brand Executive Summary In a perfect world, your shoppers log in and you can easily determine who they are, what they like and offer them a completely personalized experience no matter where they are in their shopping journey. We understand that this scenario as described above, is not a reality today but we’re here to help connect the dots. Getting shoppers to log in is a challenge and we know that most shoppers will only login to make a purchase, and even then, they’ll only do so if there is perceived value. Offering your shoppers a real-time omnichannel experience that’s merchandised to their individual behaviors and purchases requires common product, product category and user IDs across channels. Most retailers have the frst two handled -- this paper shares how you can leverage user ID matching and RichRelevance features to bring together the data points you need to identify users and motivate them to log in. There are 5 types of user matching challenges: n Handling anonymous users n Accounts per person and persons per account n Cross-channel (web, mobile app, store…) n Cross-devices (smartphone, laptop, tablet…) n Across multiple websites owned by the same company THE 5 TYPES OF USER MATCHING CHALLENGES AND HOW TO SOLVE THEM: CROSS-DEVICE, CROSS-CHANNEL, CROSS-BRAND Anonymous Users It would be great if users always logged in and had just one account each, unfortunately that’s not the reality we live in. If it were, we would be able to easily connect their behavior from visit to visit, provide better personalization and increase revenue per visit. In an effort to understand just how many shoppers remain anonymous we analyzed 3.7 billion page views across a dozen countries, on 100 of the largest websites integrated with RichRelevance and found that almost half of page views (48%) and 13% of purchases are anonymous. That is, the website cannot connect the user to a long-term user ID and shoppers visit multiple times before purchasing. Sixty percent of those 100 websites had an average of at least two visits before a visit that included a purchase. The best, most customer-centric way to personalize anonymous visits is to reduce anonymous visits. Which begs the question, how do we encourage users to log in? Priceline.com took a novel approach and is running TV ads in the U.S. that simply state, “If you don’t sign in you’ll die.” They’re joking (we hope), but they make a point and one that consumers remember – that Priceline does provide lower prices for those who log in. Like most things in merchandising, the 4 P’s are helpful when brainstorming ways to increase logins, but to further assist we’ve added a 5th P: n Product: Provide better products or features to those who log in. Facebook is a good example. You only see your personalized news feed when you log in so most everyone stays logged in. Retailers as diverse as Amazon, Wine.com, Nordstrom, Williams-Sonoma and JCPenney provide product recommendations pages and even content that is much more relevant when you are logged in. n Placement: Provide personalized features in all channels including desktop web, mobile web, email, mobile app and mobile app used in- store. n Price: Offer better prices or promotions when logged in. Priceline.com does. 1 THE 5 TYPES OF USER MATCHING CHALLENGES AND HOW TO SOLVE THEM: CROSS-DEVICE, CROSS-CHANNEL, CROSS-BRAND n Promotion: Personalize coupons, special offers and discounts and encourage customer loyalty. Starbucks’ mobile app is a great example. n Preferences: Allow users to indicate preferences that are relevant to your vertical. Even if you do all of these, many users won’t log in until just before purchasing. Two ways to get the most from personalization for users who aren’t logged in are soft logins and provisional user IDs. Soft Login A soft login is when a user logs in on a device, the retailer writes their user ID to a frst-party cookie, the user logs out, and the retailer continues to use their user ID for the current and subsequent visits. Many retailers place an expiration date on the frst-party cookie so that there is a time limit between the most recent explicit login and a soft login. When using a soft login, some website features may not be available, such as viewing past purchases, changing preferences or making a purchase. Provisional User IDs RichRelevance uses a “provisional” user ID to handle anonymous users who do have an account and will log in later. The provisional user ID automatically links a user’s behavior before logging-in to their long-term user ID when they do eventually login. Retailers and brands have a choice on implementing provisional IDs: n RichRelevance can handle it automatically using our third-party cookie ID, or n A session ID can be provided by the retailer or brand, as the provisional ID. The session ID can be anything you want, such as a traditional commerce platform session ID that resets after 30 minutes of inactivity, a frst-party cookie ID that expires in 30 days, or a frst-party cookie ID that never expires. Most ecommerce visits are now on mobile devices, and third-party cookies don’t work well there, so retailers need to give some consideration provisional IDs and determine which is best for them. 2 THE 5 TYPES OF USER MATCHING CHALLENGES AND HOW TO SOLVE THEM: CROSS-DEVICE, CROSS-CHANNEL, CROSS-BRAND Mapping Between Accounts and People MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS PER PERSON While having too few logins is a common challenge, the problem of too many accounts per person is another issue to combat. Years ago some brick-and-mortar retail chains used your phone number as your long-term user ID. Whenever you made a purchase, they’d ask for your phone number. Back then shoppers usually gave their home land line number but more recently use their mobile phone number, resulting in two IDs for the same person. Today many shoppers have multiple email addresses so if they can’t remember their password they simply create a new account using a different email address, again resulting in multiple accounts per person. RichRelevance provides a shopper ID mapping feed for retailers and brands to notify our personalization engine when they detect that a shopper has multiple IDs that should be treated as one ID. For example, if you fgure out that users 123 and 789 are the same person and send that to us in the shopper ID mapping feed, then whenever user 123 or user 789 visits, their RichRelevance personalization will be based on the combined behavior of both user IDs. provides a shopper Retailers and brands have a number of ways to detect if two users are the same person, including: ID mapping feed for n Use their own frst-party data such as credit card numbers and billing or shipping address retailers and brands n Send transactions to a third-party service company such as Acxiom to notify our to do the matching n Use online matching services such as Adobe, LiveRamp (an Acxiom personalization en- company), Gigya or Neustar1 gine when they de- DETERMINISTIC THIRD-PARTY MATCHING tect that a shopper SERVICES has multiple IDs that Services such as LiveRamp and Neustar use what’s called deterministic matching. They collect data from many websites and look for cases where should be treated as two users self-identify themselves as the same person. High-traffc sites—like one ID. Match.com and Verizon—are used to collect data on lots of people. Here’s how it typically works. You add the matching service’s tracking tags to your website and send them your user ID for each visitor. For example, when user 1 For a list of more vendors, see “2016 Edition: A marketer’s guide to cross- device identity,” Allison Schiff, AdExchanger, February 29, 2016, 3 THE 5 TYPES OF USER MATCHING CHALLENGES AND HOW TO SOLVE THEM: CROSS-DEVICE, CROSS-CHANNEL, CROSS-BRAND 123 visits, you tell the service, “This is my user 123.” When user 456 visits you tell them, “This is my user 456.” If the service sees user 123 and user 456 both log in to Match.com using the same email address, then they know that they’re the same person. Periodically, the service sends you a fle of matched user IDs, which may be sent to RichRelevance via our Shopper ID Mapping Feed. Some of the services also have the option to get a list of matched IDs at runtime. When you tell the service, “This is my user 123,” it returns user 456 and any other matched IDs. A website could sort the IDs and send the frst one to RichRelevance via our real-time APIs. That way when user 123 visits you send user 123 to RichRelevance, and when user 456 visits you also send us user 123. MULTIPLE PEOPLE PER ACCOUNT While B2C ecommerce has the challenge of multiple accounts per person, B2B has the problem of multiple people per account. Consider a small company with 20 employees where all offce supply purchases are shipped to the same address and billed to the owner’s credit card. But the owner doesn’t order much. Most of the orders are placed by the general manager or the offce manager and they each have their own logins.