Effective marketing demands a strong identity foundation – and the right identity resolution tool makes all the difference. Many platforms promise to unify data across systems, but few are equipped to handle the complexity, scale, and compliance needs of enterprise marketers. Without the right technology, even the best first-party strategies can fall short.
Whether you’re optimizing your stack or replacing legacy systems, knowing what to prioritize in an identity platform is critical. You need something that supports precision, flexibility, and integration with the tools your team already depends on.
This guide outlines the core capabilities to prioritize when evaluating identity resolution tools. It also explains how the right solution supports long-term growth, operational efficiency, and responsible data use.
Key takeaways
- Robust identity resolution tools offer features like configurable match logic and durable IDs to support scale and governance.
- Interoperability across customer data platforms (CDPs), clean rooms, clouds, and media platforms is essential for activating data in complex environments.
- Persistent identifiers like RampID improve accuracy, embrace the principles of privacy by design, and support long-term addressability without relying on inconsistent signals like cookies or hashed emails (HEMs).
- The right identity infrastructure powers collaboration, safeguards data use, and adapts as your technology and the regulatory landscape evolves.
The value of identity resolution
Enterprise identity resolution connects identifiers across platforms, devices, and data sources to create a single, persistent, and portable view of each customer or household. With that foundation in place, your team can build accurate segments, improve match rates, and activate data with greater precision. It also supports every stage of your data strategy, from onboarding and enrichment to measurement, collaboration, and governance.
A robust identity resolution solution delivers three key benefits:
- Data onboarding for online and offline matching
- Match confidence scoring
- First-party data ownership, portability, and governance
Data onboarding for online and offline matching
Customer data comes from many sources: CRMs, loyalty programs, websites, mobile apps, and point-of-sale systems – encompassing identifiers such as HEMs, device IDs, loyalty IDs, and offline transaction records. An effective identity resolution tool brings these inputs together into a single, durable identifier. This lets your team build consistent customer profiles, support engagement across both digital and physical touchpoints, and connect fragmented data across channels and platforms without exposing sensitive information.
Match confidence scoring
Each identity match includes a degree of certainty, which affects how data can be used. Higher-confidence matches improve accuracy but may reduce audience size, while lower thresholds expand reach at the cost of precision. Match confidence scoring gives your team visibility into these probabilities, allowing you to adjust thresholds based on the needs of each use case. Compliance and analytics workflows may require controls, while marketing campaigns strive for broader activation. This flexibility helps you balance campaign performance and parameters across initiatives.
First-party data ownership, portability, and governance
Maintaining ownership of your customer data is critical for long-term flexibility. A strong identity resolution platform helps you support responsible data usage, maintain consent settings, and enable data collaboration with trusted partners. With the right controls in place, your data stays compliant, portable, and ready to activate across the advertising ecosystem.
5 Key considerations when evaluating identity resolution tools
A robust identity platform should improve data accuracy, respect privacy program requirements, and integrate smoothly into your existing workflows. It needs to scale across systems, support regulatory alignment, and remain adaptable as your architecture and partnerships evolve.
The capabilities below reflect what’s essential for long-term performance and responsible data activation in complex environments:
- Built-in protocols for compliance initiatives
- Interoperability with third-party systems
- Flexible configuration options
- Persistent person- or household-level IDs
- Clean room compatibility and collaboration support
1. Built to enable compliance
Marketers must manage identity data responsibly, often under complex and evolving regulations. A strong identity platform provides built-in controls for consent flag propagation, policy enforcement, and responsible data collaboration. These capabilities enable your team to activate and measure customer data while respecting your compliance and security standards.
2. Interoperability with third-party systems
An effective identity platform ties customer data together across teams, platforms, and partners – reliably and at scale. That includes cloud environments, CDPs, demand-side platforms (DSPs), analytics tools, and partner platforms. This interoperability makes it easier to synchronize audiences, and streamline activation across owned and paid channels. Seamless integration reduces operational overhead and expands where and how your data can be used.
3. Flexible configuration options
Customer data strategies often require extensive customization on tight timelines that in-house development teams struggle to meet. A strong identity resolution tool gives business users control over how records are matched, how thresholds are applied, and how identifiers are stored and managed with minimal support from technical teams. Configurable logic should allow your teams to tailor workflows to specific use cases, business rules, or regulatory conditions. These options reduce the need for custom development and support faster adaptation across departments.
4. Persistent individual- or household-level IDs
Durable identifiers support long-term engagement. The ability to secure an individual or household identifier enables deeper insights, more accurate attribution, and consistent audience targeting across channels. While static identifiers like HEMs can lead to inconsistent matching, a persistent identifier ensures that identities remain usable as platforms and signals evolve across the ecosystem.
5. Clean room compatibility and collaboration support
Complex omnichannel campaigns often rely on data collaboration with partners – and that collaboration depends in turn on responsible infrastructure. Identity platforms that integrate with clean rooms make it easier to collaborate with datasets, build shared audiences, and run co-marketing campaigns without exchanging raw PII. This capability supports strategic partnerships and data integrity, anticipating the requirements of your legal and compliance teams.
Types of identity resolution tools
Identity resolution capabilities can be found in several areas of the modern data stack. Some are built into end-to-end marketing suites, while others rely on modular infrastructure that integrates with your existing systems. Understanding the structure behind each of the following approaches can help your team evaluate which setup aligns best with your goals for scale, interoperability, and governance:
- Data collaboration platform
- Packaged CDPs
- Composable CDPs
- Identity and data providers
- Marketing platforms
- Cloud-native apps
Data collaboration platform
What it is: A data collaboration platform’s secure environment allows brands and partners to collaborate with data. That means multiple parties can match audiences, measure outcomes, and generate insights while minimizing data movement. These platforms often leverage clean rooms, multi-party computation, and other flexible controls to manage your compliance initiatives. Platforms can be deployed as cloud-native or embedded solutions, meeting partners wherever their data lives.
Benefits:
- Generates actionable insights while maintaining data security
- Lets brands, retailers, and media partners work together directly
- Expands reach across large partner networks, even with limited first-party data
- Helps build trust by keeping data in a secure environment while setting your desired governance controls
- Preserves targeting and measurement as third-party signals disappear
- Supports both measurement and planning use cases across partners
Limitations:
- May require upfront coordination with partners to align on data permissions and activation workflows
- Some advanced features may require integration support depending on the partner’s data environment or regional privacy program requirements
Packaged CDPs
What it is: Packaged CDPs are pre-built platforms that unify first-party data from internal systems. They often include identity resolution to link behavioral, CRM, and app data into a centralized profile.
Benefits:
- Identity resolution within an internal, owned tech stack or ecosystem
- Fast setup time
- Easy to use with minimal technical lift
- Aligns teams around a single customer view
Limitations:
- Limited external activation due to reliance on static identifiers like HEMs
- Less flexibility for customization
- Identity often siloed and lacking a native offline identity graph
- Limited partner connectivity
Composable CDPs
What it is: Composable CDPs are modular architectures built around a cloud data warehouse that integrate tools for data ingestion, storage, enrichment, identity resolution, and activation.
Benefits:
- No need to copy data
- High flexibility and control across the data stack
- Customizable identity resolution based on business needs
- Ideal for organizations with strong internal data teams
Limitations:
- Requires more technical expertise and resources
- Longer implementation timelines
- Complexity can increase total cost of ownership
Identity and data providers
What it is: These third-party services create and maintain proprietary identity graphs that link online and offline identifiers to a single individual or household. They often supply complementary datasets such as demographics, lifestyle, or purchase intent to enrich customer understanding.
Benefits:
- Provides an identity graph to bridge offline and online data
- Strengthens identity resolution when first-party data is limited or fragmented
- Expands customer profiles with enriched attributes and third-party data sets
- Offers pre-built integrations with marketing, media, and analytics platforms
Limitations:
- Reliance on external providers can add costs and vendor dependencies
- Dependence non-durable identifiers like IP address matching reduces accuracy
- Enrichment data may be uneven, with gaps across industries, regions, or channels
- Data governance requirements may limit the types of data that can be used
Marketing platforms
What it is: Some omnichannel marketing suites bundle identity resolution tools with tools for campaign management, personalization, and audience segmentation. These platforms often use proprietary identifiers.
Benefits:
- Supports real-time personalization and audience targeting
- Covers more use cases beyond owned asset activation
- Streamlines execution within a single platform
Limitations:
- Identity data is often locked within the platform
- Harder to coordinate across teams, partners, or external media
- Limited transparency into how identities are resolved or audiences are built
- Often reliant on managed service models
Cloud-native apps
What it is: App-based identity resolution tools run directly within cloud environments like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks. These solutions use stable identifiers such as RampID, mobile ad IDs, and transaction data. They can also incorporate HEMs depending on the use case and data availability.Benefits:
- No need to copy data
- Supports strong data governance and minimization of data movement
- Scales efficiently with cloud infrastructure
- Offers flexibility to use a mix of identifiers for broader reach
Limitations:
- Requires significant custom engineering to maintain the tech stack
- May require robust identity pipelines to manage and maintain multiple identifier types
- Dependent on having clean, structured data in your cloud environment
- Native resolution may be limited to basic matching or person-based resolution and integrating robust identity graphs is often needed
- Cross-cloud or hybrid compatibility may be limited
Top identity resolution tools
A wide range of identity resolution solutions are available on the market, each with its own approach to data unification, governance, and activation. Here are eight of the most popular enterprise options:
LiveRamp
Solution type: Data collaboration platform
The LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform enables brands, publishers, and platforms to deliver exceptional customer experiences and drive measurable performance everywhere it matters. At its core is RampID, the most durable, interoperable, and secure identifier for connecting the marketing ecosystem.
As a durable, interoperable, and secure identifier, RampID accurately links and translates any authenticated identifier or combination of identifiers across channels, partners, and platforms. This helps maintain identity continuity even as signal loss accelerates, while supporting the privacy program preferences of each participating brand, publisher, or platform. Unlike HEMs, which are static, inconsistent, and often limited in scale, RampID delivers significantly higher match rates and broader reach. In fact, HEM-to-RampID matching results in 44% more matches than HEM-to-HEM matching, on average.
In addition, RampID is the only fully interoperable identity resolution tool designed for today’s composable and cloud-native infrastructures. Whether you’re working within Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or a custom CDP architecture, LiveRamp integrates directly into your existing environment. This enables you to activate, measure, and collaborate with partners without moving data.
For enterprise teams prioritizing flexibility, governance, and long-term data strategy, RampID offers a future-ready foundation that grows with your business.
The Total Economic Impact™ of the LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform
AIQ
Solution type: Packaged CDP; cloud-native app
The AIQ platform combines data unification, identity resolution, and campaign execution within a single cloud-native environment. Marketers can segment audiences and automate workflows without relying on external tools or additional data infrastructure.
Its all-in-one approach may limit customization and modularity for teams with complex or highly specific data architectures.
Amperity’s AmpID
Solution type: Packaged CDP
AmpID is part of Amperity’s identity infrastructure and supports resolution using both deterministic and probabilistic methods. It connects data from loyalty programs, transactions, and behavioral signals into persistent profiles that power analytics and customer engagement.
As a packaged solution, AmpID may offer less flexibility for teams looking to build custom workflows directly within their cloud data environments.
Epsilon
Solution type: Marketing platform
Epsilon enables persistent customer recognition across devices and channels using its COREidⓇ identity resolution services. The platform supports targeted campaign activation and delivers closed-loop measurement to help brands optimize performance over time.
As a primarily closed system, Epsilon offers less flexibility for organizations that want to build on top of existing cloud data infrastructure. Customers may have limited control over how data is organized and enhanced.
Experian
Solution type: Identity and data providers
Experian’s identity resolution solution, MarketingConnect, combines data from CRMs, email subscribers, website visits, advertising, and third parties – along with contextual, behavioral, credit, and noncredit sources – using real-time deterministic and probabilistic matching to identify and link consumer identities to the household level.
By anchoring to household-level profiles, Experian may lack a true person-based view, potentially limiting precision in individual-level targeting and personalization. Moreover, it matches to IP addresses, which is not a durable identifier.
GrowthLoop
Solution type: Composable CDP
GrowthLoop’s no-code interface and AI-powered automation allows marketers to build journeys, launch campaigns, and continuously optimize performance using the data infrastructure they already have in place.
Because it depends on the underlying cloud data environment, performance and scalability are closely tied to the quality and setup of your data warehouse.
Hightouch
Solution type: Composable CDP
Hightouch provides identity resolution as part of its reverse Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) and composable CDP offerings. It operates natively within cloud data warehouses and enables teams to match customer identifiers across datasets using SQL-based workflows.
Hightouch relies on warehouse-native infrastructure, which means performance and identity resolution accuracy depend on the quality and completeness of the underlying data. It lacks a native reference graph and identifier necessary to accurately match customer touchpoints, limiting scalability.
Rudderstack
Solution type: Cloud-native app
Built for engineering and data teams, RudderStack routes event data – data from real-time actions like app engagement, website clicks, or purchases – from digital sources into cloud data warehouses and downstream tools. It also supports identity resolution via real-time transformations and profile enrichment as part of its event streaming pipeline.
RudderStack’s strength lies in data collection and routing, but marketers may need additional tools for orchestration and activation workflows. Code-based identity resolution lacks the ability to connect offline data to an individual or household, requiring manual technical effort.
Zeta
Solution type: Marketing platform
Designed to unify identity, intent, and activation, Zeta’s platform helps marketers personalize outreach at scale. Its AI-driven engine leverages proprietary data to create rich customer profiles and deliver cross-channel engagement across email, mobile, web, and connected TV.
Because Zeta relies heavily on its own proprietary data and ecosystem, integration with external first-party data sources can make cross-platform integration a challenge.
Unlock a truly connected customer view with LiveRamp
Know your customer. Prove ROI. Maximize your tech. The LiveRamp Data Collaboration Platform empowers enterprise teams to drive performance, efficiency, and measurable business value – fast.
According to a commissioned Forrester Consulting study, companies using LiveRamp achieved a 313% ROI and $9.6 million in business benefits over three years, with a payback period of less than six months. By improving media measurement, organizations drove over $26 million in incremental revenue and gained a 15% efficiency boost in paid media spend.
Let’s help you unlock similar outcomes. Explore a self-guided demo of LiveRamp’s identity solution or get in touch today.
Identity resolution tool FAQs
If you’re exploring identity resolution tools, these FAQs cover how LiveRamp works and what to expect from the platform.
How does LiveRamp resolve identities across online and offline data sources?
LiveRamp connects data from CRMs, websites, mobile apps, and in-store transactions using deterministic matching techniques. RampID – the most durable, interoperable, and secure identifier for connecting the ecosystem – enables persistent resolution across devices and environments without exposing raw PII.
What identifiers does LiveRamp support?
LiveRamp supports a wide range of identifiers, including HEMs, device IDs, loyalty IDs, postal addresses, and mobile ad IDs. These inputs are resolved into RampID to unify customer profiles across channels.
What is RampID, and how does it power LiveRamp’s identity resolution?
RampID is the most durable, interoperable, and secure identifier for connecting the ecosystem. It accurately links and translates any authenticated identifier or combination of identifiers while respecting each party’s privacy configurations and preferences. It serves as the foundation for LiveRamp’s enterprise identity solution and enables consistent activation and measurement across platforms.
How does RampID compare to hashed emails (HEMs)?
Unlike HEMs, which are static emails that can be tied to a single point in time or device, RampID is persistent, interoperable, and not dependent on any one input. It provides more stable, scalable identity resolution across environments.
How quickly can I start activating resolved identities?
LiveRamp supports rapid onboarding through direct integrations with cloud platforms, CDPs, and media partners. Most teams can begin activating resolved audiences within days, depending on data readiness and partner setup.
Does LiveRamp’s identity resolution support my privacy program requirements?
Yes. LiveRamp is built to embrace privacy by design, with products and services developed to support your privacy program. This provides compliance tooling for consent management, data minimization principles, and responsible collaboration built into your workflows.
Can I integrate LiveRamp with my existing CDP or cloud environment?
Yes. LiveRamp is designed for interoperability. It integrates with leading CDPs, cloud data warehouses, clean rooms, and activation platforms to support flexible identity workflows.
What kind of support does LiveRamp offer during onboarding?
LiveRamp provides guided onboarding, technical support, and dedicated client success teams to enable smooth implementation and fast time to value.
How does LiveRamp compare to other identity resolution providers?
LiveRamp’s RampID is the most durable, interoperable, and secure identifier for connecting the ecosystem, helping marketers build a resilient, scalable identity strategy centered on accuracy, interoperability, and trust. As the world’s most powerful data collaboration network, LiveRamp helps you reach consumers wherever they spend time and access connected audiences across 92% of the advertising ecosystem.
Does LiveRamp support global brands with international compliance standards?
LiveRamp is committed to upholding data ethics, privacy and security, and compliance while fostering partnerships that align with these principles. Our solutions support multinational data flows and provide localization capabilities to help global enterprises confidently activate data worldwide.