Activation Terms and Concepts

Connect is the cloud-based software application you can use to upload, manage, and distribute your data. Your account manager, or the admin user at your company, will provide you with login credentials. There are many help articles and training videos to help you get started using Connect quickly and easily.

There are two basic types of data you can include in files you upload to us:

In LiveRamp Connect, files and segments are stored in "audiences." Audiences are basically just a container for your data, a way to separate and organize different data sets. You will generally have one audience for each workflow, just to keep things organized.

All files uploaded to a particular audience must have the same identifier data type, such as PII, cookies, mobile device ID, RampID, and so on.

For a given audience, all files must have the exact same column headers for the identifier data. This means that, for the columns, we're using for matching (in most cases, the columns containing PII), those columns’ headers must be identical each time.

An audience key is a column in your files that acts as a unique ID for all of the records in a given LiveRamp audience. A typical audience key might be client customer IDs, email addresses, or phone numbers. The audience key is used to consolidate duplicate rows in an audience.

Therefore, there are two main criteria for choosing a good audience key:

All files must have an audience key, and all files within the same audience must use the same audience key.

If you aren't able to provide a client customer ID (CCID) for your offline data records, we will choose the PII identifier that has the largest fill rate (percentage of records with a value), and that identifier will be used as the audience key for all files in that audience.

Within Connect, a field is a set of segment data that holds a specific category of different values. For example, you might have a field called "Car_Owned" that contains segments of specific field/value pairings, such as “Car_Owned:Ford” and “Car_Owned:Tesla”. You can also think of a “field” as the key in a standard key-value pair or as the column heading for a column of segment data.

In general, after you upload a file, LiveRamp creates fields from the columns of segment data in that file.

Field Example

Within Connect, a field is a set of segment data that holds a specific category of values, such as "Car_Owned."

For example, after LiveRamp ingests a file you upload, the columns in a column-based file become fields that you can manage in Connect (within the audience the file was uploaded to).

Within a given field, a set of distinct field/value pairings (such as "Car_Owned=BMW") creates a segment.

Caution

A field in a given file that has more than 250 distinct field/value pairings is considered a "raw field" and segments in those fields cannot be enumerated in Connect or distributed to most destinations. Raw fields can often only be distributed by creating derived segments from them in Connect.

Within Connect, a segment is a group of your records that are defined by a specific attribute, For example, for a field in your file called "Car_Owned", you might have 500 records that have a value of “Ford”. So the segment “Car_Owned:Ford” would contain all the records that have the field/value pairing “Car_Owned:Ford”.

See the following articles for more information:

A specific value for a given field. Think of this as the value in a standard key-value pair or as the column entries for a column of segment data.

A value or set of values that are distinct from all other values for a given field in a data file.

A field with 250 or less distinct values is considered an "enumerated field", and those distinct values are enumerated (separated out) as segments so that they can be managed individually in Connect (for more information, see "Enumerated Field").

A field with more than 250 distinct values is considered a "raw field", and those distinct values will not be enumerated as segments in Connect (for more information, see "Raw Field").

For many onboarding customers, the primary type of identifier data you’re going to upload is PII, or personally-identifiable information. This refers to a number of possible consumer touchpoints, such as name and postal address, email address, or phone number. PII can be used to identify an individual, either on its own or when combined with some other data.

When this type of data is used as an identifier in a file, it is usually referred to as a "PII identifier." LiveRamp uses PII identifiers to match records in your files to the data in its Identity Graph.

Some customers might send “online data” such as cookies, mobile device IDs, or their custom IDs. Because this type of data can’t be used to directly identify an individual on its own, these data are categorized as "pseudonymous" data.

A destination account at LiveRamp is a set of configurations that allow you to distribute data to a particular seat (or account) at a destination.

When you select segments to distribute to a destination account, that creates a “distribution”. LiveRamp then delivers the data to the destination, and then refreshes that data periodically. See “How LiveRamp Refreshes Distributed Data” for more information.

When we use these terms, we mean: