Conversions APIs (CAPIs) are secure tools helping marketers track and optimize their campaigns across major platforms without the need for third-party signals, all while protecting consumer data. However, not all CAPI integrations are created equal: just as marketers can customize every part of their marketing stack, they also have a choice of how to implement their CAPIs, with options that allow them to substantially improve marketing outcomes by making more matches and streamlining integrations, all while offering superior results.
Why hashed emails are an outdated marketing practice
Hashed emails are a commonly-used shortcut for identity and marketing. Hashed emails are what they sound like: regular email addresses, transformed to create a fixed-length string of characters to represent the email. When leveraged as-is for connectivity, marketers then match their hashed email to partners’ hashed emails to power media transactions.
This approach limits match rates and fails to provide best-in-class ROI to marketers. Hashed emails, used on their own, have a single ingredient: the email address. If consumers are not using the same email across channels, and are instead using a different identifier – or even more likely, a number of different identifiers across the customer journey – marketers using hashed emails alone to power their marketing won’t be able to engage consumers across devices, within households, or across environments. Such a limited approach limits scale and the ability to reach the right consumer with the right message at the right time.
Without additional protection, hashed emails are also vulnerable to privacy and regulatory concerns. Hashed emails lack built-in rigorous technical protection; although hashed emails are supposed to be impossible to reverse engineer, easily-available tools make this possible. Bad actors have been known to sell services offering reverse-engineering hashed emails, or the actual toolsets that make this possible. In today’s privacy-centric environment, leveraging hashed emails as the basis for a marketing stack significantly increases the chances of customers’ data being put at risk.
Why RampID drives better marketing
More robust identifiers, like LiveRamp’s RampID, link name, address, and other signals that help to improve omnichannel targeting and measurement. If using hashed emails is single-ingredient cooking, identifiers that incorporate different data points are like cooking with a full spice rack. LiveRamp testing of RampID has shown up to a 52% increase in match rates versus hashed emails.
Improving match rates improves every aspect of marketing. Reach becomes more accurate, conversion rates increase, wasted media spend decreases, clean room analysis becomes more insightful – all driving significant improvements in ROAS and marketing performance.
By improving targeting, marketers can reach the right consumers across the ecosystem, drive effective marketing, and increase return on ad spend (ROAS). Through creating a better view of customers across all of their various touchpoints – and signals – marketers are better able to measure their results, enabling them to further increase their effectiveness and understand their performance.
What this means for CAPIs
Similar to how building marketing strategies around hashed emails leaves companies vulnerable to privacy and regulatory concerns, using hashed emails as the basis for CAPI integrations opens up these same concerns as well.
Hashed emails’ performance issues mean that event data and conversions sent via APIs won’t accurately match to exposures. Downstream, marketers might then suppress individuals from retargeting efforts, even if they have not converted – or overtarget individuals that have converted.
Consider that the average consumer has 2-3 email addresses, and households often share emails for things like subscriptions. RampID enables brands to target and measure on multiple identifiers. For a household where CTV subscriptions may be on one email, while grocery loyalty programs may be on another’s phone number, with RampID, a brand is more likely to be able to attribute a CTV ad exposure to the in-store purchase happening at this household.
Compared to identifiers like RampID, hashed emails deliver lower performance for marketing, and the same is true for powering CAPIs.
To learn more about how to power your CAPIs with RampID, reach out to [email protected].