Announcing Upcoming Accuracy Improvements Through Name and Phone Matching (6/10/19)
On June 26, 2019, we’ll be updating all LiveRamp audiences that include name and phone touchpoints to match on both name and phone instead of only on phone.
Your records might contain multiple touchpoints of PII (personally identifiable information) per record that could correspond to more than one actual person. This often happens for home phone numbers that are shared by multiple people.
At the end of 2018, LiveRamp rolled out an update to our identity graph which improved the accuracy of people-based matching by changing the way we match on phone numbers. This update eliminates extra matches by leveraging the name information when matching on phone (if available). These extra matches might come from phone touchpoints in a record, which do not closely corroborate with the record as a whole.
Our testing has shown that matching on name and phone results in a 19% increase in match accuracy on average.
Note
A match rate decrease will result from fewer RampIDs (RampIDs) matching from phone touchpoints, but will result in less mistargeted ad spend, more accurate suppression, and better measurement.
When that update was implemented, it required each audience to be configured manually to see the benefit. To make sure all our customers benefit from this change, we will automatically change the configurations for all LiveRamp audiences with name and postal (NAP) and phone touchpoints to use name and phone matching effective June 26.
If you have additional questions, or if you would like to opt-out of name and phone matching, contact your LiveRamp account team.
FAQs
Will this update change the RampIDs in my existing files?
Name and phone matching will only be used for net-new imports, so this update will not change the RampIDs in your existing files. If the benefits of name and phone matching are critical to you, have your LiveRamp PO perform a full audience refresh. Otherwise, the audience will be gradually updated with every new incremental import and as a result the increase in match accuracy, RampID consolidation and match rate decrease happen over time.
Can I opt out?
We recommended that you use name and phone matching to gain the benefits of increased accuracy. However, if you wish to opt-out, contact your LiveRamp account team.