Announcing Terminology Changes (2/1/19)
In an effort to reduce potential confusion, we've recently re-examined the terms we use at LiveRamp and their definitions. In many cases, these terms have not changed, but in some cases we've changed to terms that we feel are more accurate and (hopefully) easier to understand.
We've also provided definitions for all of the terms we use. You can find a list of these terms in our Glossary of All Terms, and in the "Understanding LiveRamp" section of our help center, and many help articles now contain links to these definitions when those terms are used.
There are two changes we've made that are somewhat significant, so we'd like to bring those to your attention.
Identifier Classifications
Previously: "Offline identifiers" meant identifiers such as name and postal address, email, or phone number, and "online identifiers" meant identifiers such as cookie ID or mobile device ID.
Now: "Known identifiers" replaces "offline identifiers" and "anonymous identifiers" replaces "online identifiers."
Previously the main terms we've used to describe the basic categories of identifiers have been “offline” and “online”. Since those terms are a somewhat imperfect representation of the identifiers themselves, we’ll now be talking more often in terms of “known identifiers” and “anonymous identifiers", with the subcategories of “PII identifiers” and “device identifiers” being used where appropriate.
We hope this will also make it easier to understand how these identifiers should be treated in terms of keeping known and anonymous data separate within data files and within data storage systems.
Note
You can expect to continue to hear us refer to "offline data" and "online data" as a shorthand way to refer to data collected offline (such as CRM data) and data collected online (such as data tied to cookie IDs or mobile device IDs).
Limit the Meaning of “Segment”
Previously: "Segment" might mean both a group of many different field/value pairings, as well as a group of distinct field/value pairings.
Now: "Segment" means only a subset of users or unique records defined by a specific attribute (or field/value pairing).
We realize that many customers might use this term somewhat flexibly to include both a group of many different field/value pairings (what at LiveRamp we often refer to as a “field”, represented by an entire column of data in a file, such as “Gender”) as well as a group of distinct field/value pairings (such as “Gender=Female”).
So that we can be clear about which object in our system we're referring to, once data are ingested, we will try to only use “segment” for a group of distinct field/value pairings.