Data onboarding
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Data onboarding is the process of transferring offline data to an online environment for marketing needs.[1][2] Data onboarding is mainly used to connect offline customer records with online users by matching identifying information gathered from offline datasets to retrieve the same customers in an online audience.[3]
More specifically, data onboarding links personally identifiable information held in offline sources—such as sales transactions, loyalty programs, or CRM systems—with non-PII digital identifiers like browser cookies, IP addresses, and device IDs to create unified consumer profiles for targeting and measurement.[3]
The onboarding process involves ingesting, anonymizing, matching and distributing a customer's data.[4] Offline data used in onboarding efforts include information such as customer names, email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers as well as CRM and sales transaction data. Part of the data onboarding process is anonymizing personally identifiable information to protect consumer privacy. Another key step involves matching offline data to online devices, such as a desktop browser cookie or mobile device ID. Offline data like a customer's email address or postal address can also be used as an identifier to match to digital IDs, such as a Facebook or X (formerly Twitter) account.[3] Matched data is finally delivered to a technology platform for use in programmatic marketing.
A key metric in data onboarding is the match rate, which refers to the percentage of offline records that can be successfully linked to online identifiers. Match rates depend on the quality and completeness of input data, the matching methodology used (deterministic or probabilistic), and the persistence of identifiers such as cookies or device IDs.[5] Deterministic matching relies on explicit identifiers such as email addresses or login data to link records at the individual level, while probabilistic matching uses statistical models and patterns across data signals to infer connections.[6][7]
Data onboarding is primarily used to reach a company's customers with more relevant marketing messages. Companies can also use onboarded data to assess the effectiveness of a marketing campaign or the purchasing trends of their customers. Overall, the process enables marketers to use offline customer data to inform online campaign decisions.[8]