Marketing Engineering Advanced

Streamlining Customer Onboarding and Media Activation with Segment, Snowflake, and LiveRamp

Leverage Segment, LiveRamp, and Snowflake to create 'Golden Profiles,' enabling precise targeting and improved return on ad spend in a changing privacy-first, cookie-less marketing world. This guide offers a step-by-step process for unifying first-party data for richer customer insights and streamlined audience onboarding.

Made by Safdar Jaffari

Made by Shawn Gilleran

Made by Ben Healy

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Segment Connections
Unify
Profile Sync
Snowflake
LiveRamp

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As privacy regulations become stricter and third-party cookies vanish, marketers are faced with a challenging identity landscape when attempting to improve their paid media targeting and return on ad spend. In addition to this, data teams are faced with greater complexities in their data management strategies and are looking for ways to activate their customer data in simplified ways from their centralized data warehouses.

In this recipe, we’ll show you how Twilio Segment can help you take your online and offline first-party data, join it together to get a 360-degree view of the customer journey, and seamlessly onboard id-resolved profiles into LiveRamp’s Snowflake Native App.

Twilio Segment’s first-party identity resolution unifies customer interactions, behaviors, preferences, and audience membership to build a robust and warehouse-portable 360 view of the customer.

With the first-party data in hand, marketers can target customers with personalized and relevant content across digital channels by matching the first-party data with LiveRamps’ third-party anonymized identity graph - and ultimately activate into digital media platforms.

One of the most efficient ways of onboarding Twilio Segment’s robust first-party audiences into LiveRamp is leveraging LiveRamp’s native Snowflake application, requiring no movement of data from Snowflake.

Let us walk you through this process:

Step 1: Create Profiles In Unify

Segment aggregates user engagement data from a multitude of platforms such as your websites, mobile applications, backend servers, and cloud-based apps. It uses first-party identifiers, defined by you, from these diverse sources to construct customer profiles. Segment also generates anonymous profiles that encapsulate all interactions and characteristics for unidentified users. You have the autonomy to choose the first-party identifiers that align with your business requirements. To kickstart your identity resolution and start building these profiles, simply go to the "Unify Settings" on the left-hand sidebar in your Segment account and follow the straightforward instructions in our documentation.

If you already have Unify configured and Profile Sync turned on, feel free to skip to Step 4.

Step 2: Setup Profile Sync

With your Profiles ready, the next step is to turn on Profile Sync to sync the identity-resolved profiles into Snowflake. Our documentation provides easy-to-follow steps to assist you in this setup.

Here's an example of how golden profile records may appear in Snowflake, complete with all customer traits, audience membership, and advanced calculations as data points for each customer.

Step 3: Install LiveRamp Native Snowflake App

For access to LiveRamp’s native applications, first please reach out to your LiveRamp account team or snowflake@liveramp.com

LiveRamp’s documentation gives a detailed overview of the processes required. At a high level, this includes:

Accepting Snowflakes Terms of Service
Installing the desired application(s) to your designated warehouse in Snowflake
Authenticating the application using the credentials provided by LiveRamp
Configuring Metrics and Logging tables to be used by both your organization and LiveRamp for performance monitoring and troubleshooting/debugging

The application comes with an Application Setup Workbook with sample SQL to easily configure the above.

Step 4: Prepare Data & Execute LiveRamp Identity Resolution

With the application installed the next step is to prepare your data tables from Segment’s Profile Sync process to be called against the applications.

First, you’ll want to determine which identifiers within your tables are eligible for resolution. LiveRamp’s application categorizes identifiers into four buckets, each with a defined input format:

Full PII*:
- Name
- Postal Address
- Email
- Phone Number

*Not all of the above are required for every record

Email Only
Device:
- 3rd party cookies
- MAIDs (mobile device IDs)
- CTV IDs (Connected TV IDs)
- RampIDs (in this case to be resolved to a Household RampID)
CIDs: Custom Identifiers from a platform partner, or one with which you have directly established an identity sync with LiveRamp, such as your internal Customer ID.

Once you have determined the above, you’ll format the input table to the corresponding format detailed here.

Privacy Filters: When preparing PII-based tables, it is important to consider LiveRamp’s privacy filter process. At a high level, these are checks that occur within a job to ensure that the attribute columns (ie non-identifiers) within your input tables do not contain values that are too unique. This is critical to ensure consumer privacy is maintained and to avoid the possibility of reidentification.

The next step will be to specify the variables for the job within the Execution Steps worksheet provided in the app, which includes details such as the target database where the job will run, the associated tables (input data, metrics, logging), as well as defining what the output table should be named.

With the variables set, you’ll then create the metadata table, which gives details on the specific job type to be executed based on the category of identifiers involved.

With the above set, your last two steps are to run the operation and check for the output:

Operation

      

			call lr_resolution_and_transcoding(
  $customer_input_table_name,
  $customer_meta_table_name,
  $output_table_name,
  $customer_logging_table_name,
  $customer_metrics_table_name
);
		

Check for Output

      
			call check_for_output(
  $output_table_name
);

The output will look slightly different based on the identifiers involved.

With the operation complete you now have data from Segment resolved to a dedicated encoding of RampID, LiveRamp’s person-based, pseudonymous identifier.

The full process is outlined here within LiveRamp’s documentation.

Step 5: LiveRamp Activation

With your data now pseudonymized to your dedicated encoding of RampID, you can share the RampID-based tables to LiveRamp’s Managed Activation Application for streamlined fulfillment to your key advertising platform partners. With this application, customers see several benefits:

Data Minimization: LiveRamp’s Activation app uses Snowflake’s Secure Data Share feature to effectively read the tables directly from your instance. No data is moved from Snowflake until the point of delivery to the downstream partner.
Secure 1st Party Activation: By using the above Identity Resolution application, LiveRamp’s Activation application will only utilize the RampID-based tables in your Snowflake instance, and thus PII will never have to leave your walls.
Expedite Time to Live: By resolving data to RampID directly in your environment, delivery to an end destination can occur within a matter of hours, as compared to several days when using LiveRamp’s more traditional file-based approach. This greatly increases the ability to optimize campaign performance promptly.
Operational Savings: Similar to the above, through the use of Snowflake’s Secure Data Share feature customers save time and money when compared to coordinating the egress of files to LiveRamp or directly to any end destination.

The Activation Application includes a business-user-friendly interface for additional segmentation and selection/configuration of downstream destination partners. For more details on the application please reach out to your LiveRamp account team or snowflake@liveramp.com.

Transcoding and Collaboration

LiveRamp also offers a native application to transcode data from one partner’s RampID encoding to your encoding, or vice-versa. This allows for secure collaboration with your key partners directly in Snowflake while alleviating the need to deliver directly identifiable customer data. See here for more details or reach out to your LiveRamp account team or snowflake@liveramp.com.

Wrapping up

With Snowflake in the center of the technology stack, and Twilio Segment delivering consistent and complete first-party customer profiles with audience membership, businesses can drive more efficient onboarding into LiveRamp, in a privacy-compliant manner.

Recipe Summary:

Segment's Profiles Sync for Unified User Profiles: Segment's Profiles Sync effortlessly amalgamates various user data points into a comprehensive profile, offering a complete view of the customers. These profiles encompass customer identities, traits, audience memberships, and journey activation statuses.
Integration with Snowflake: These user profiles are automatically transferred into Snowflake tables, guaranteeing data uniformity and easy accessibility.
LiveRamp for Efficient Onboarding: Utilize LiveRamp's native Snowflake app to onboard audiences into LiveRamp with RampIDs resolution against Segment's unified profiles. This simplifies identity resolution and audience targeting.
Paid Media Activations Optimization: By linking RampIDs with first-party data, advertising campaigns can target audiences with greater precision.

Use Case Unlock:

Tailored Marketing Campaigns: Create highly customized marketing campaigns using the rich data from Segment's unified profiles combined with third-party from LiveRamp, ensuring the appropriate message is delivered to the right audience at the optimal time.
Consistent Omnichannel Customer Experience: Consistent messaging and user experience across various channels, whether it's in-store, online, or through paid media.
Efficient Audience Segmentation: Segment audiences based on factors like purchasing behavior, preferences, browsing history, and more, enhancing targeting for paid media channels.
Decreased Ad Wastage: By targeting with precision, reducing irrelevant ad exposures, and ensuring marketing budgets are utilized efficiently.
Improved Customer Insights: Deep dive into customer behavior, product preferences, buying cycles, and potential upsell/cross-sell opportunities.

Recipe Summary:

How to build a Golden Profile in Unify
How to send the Golden Profile to Snowflake
How to leverage the Golden Profile in Snowflake to onboard into LiveRamp
Utilizing LiveRamp Resolution to pinpoint customer identities across diverse identifiers.
Securely collaborate with partners throughout the digital ecosystem.

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