The best LiveRamp alternatives and competitors

You’ve likely stumbled across LiveRamp before. The company dominates the data onboarding industry, helping companies build audiences and sync them directly to add platforms. However, exactly how LiveRamp works is a mystery; the entire platform is a black box. This is likely why the company has declined (at least according to Google Trends).

As cloud data warehouses have become increasingly popular and the concept of the Composable CDP, LiveRamp’s technology has struggled to adapt, and many competitors are now starting to eat away at their market share. If you’re looking to modernize your data onboarding process, this article will help. Below is a detailed list of the top alternatives and LiveRamp competitors.

Hightouch

Hightouch is a Data Activation platform that helps businesses get customer data to any tool — including all of the ad platforms Liveramp onboards data to. This LiveRamp competitor provides powerful features to help companies collect data in their data warehouse, resolve identities in their data warehouse, and sync data to any ad or lifecycle platform. It can achieve this from any data warehouse into 200+ downstream tools. Marketing, sales, and customer success teams can use it to personalize experiences, drive revenue, and grow their businesses.

Hightouch has a range of features that can aid you across any stage of data maturity. Its core product suite can be purchased together or individually and includes:

• Web and server event collection
• Identity resolution
• Visual audience builder
• Reverse ETL
• Personalization API
• Match Booster

The main feature that makes it a top LiveRamp competitor is Hightouch’s Match Booster product. As you sync audiences and conversions to ad platforms, Match Booster increases your match rates by enriching your data with more user identifiers in flight. It does use the same aggregated third-party data sets that LiveRamp relies on.

Hightouch Match Booster

Still, instead of uploading and storing your data with LiveRamp, you can simply send data directly from your data warehouse to ad platforms while achieving the same match rates. This enrichment leads to increased advertising campaign reach and accuracy on suppression campaigns.

TransUnion TruAudience

TransUnion started as a Credit Reporting service. However, because of their rich customer data set, they have created an offering similar called TruAudience, making it a LiveRamp competitor.

TruAudience has three main offerings: TruAudience Identity, TruAudience Platform, and TruAudience Data Marketplace. In a nutshell, these three offerings combine to help you create an identity graph of all of their customers, enrich that data with 3rd party data available in their marketplace, and build audiences to send to their tools.

TransUnion dashboard source

Overall, this allows companies to get a 360-degree view of their customers and use that to power more personalized marketing campaigns.

Experian

Experian has a lot of similarities to TransUnion because it also started as a credit reporting agency. Experian Data Solutions offers 3rd party data sources, including consumer data, business and commercial credit data, fraud and identity data, and more. You can purchase this data to enrich existing customer data or find new data for ad targeting. Experian’s solutions cater to various industries, turning data into actionable insights for strategic business applications.

Experian Data Studio source

The main problem with Experian, when compared to LiveRamp, is the lack of a robust data activation layer. Experian does not have great tooling to allow you to seamlessly sync your data to ad platforms after they help provide or enrich your data. This means you must have an existing robust data management system separate from Experian to onboard your data to ad platforms. Experian is more of a data provider than a data onboarding platform.

Epsilon

Epsilon offers various services, including data-driven marketing, customer insights, and technology solutions to help you effectively understand and engage your audience. Epsilon's approach involves leveraging data and technology to create personalized customer experiences to drive performance and growth.

Epsilon emphasizes maximizing audience reach via a data onboarding and activation solution. Its COREID provides an identity resolution solution to help you get a complete view of your customers. Epsilon Digital helps activate your data by using AI to deliver relevant messages to customers across different channels and optimize performance. It also provides a database of over 250 million consumers to help build customer audiences.

Epsilon dashboard source

Throtle

Throtle specializes in healthcare marketing identity solutions. They focus on connecting online and offline data to create an identity graph for patients and healthcare providers (HCPs). Their proprietary graph constantly evolves to provide an anonymized, holistic view of individuals across channels and devices, ensuring accuracy and data privacy. Throtle's services are designed for various healthcare sectors, including pharmaceutical brands and hospitals, emphasizing accuracy, transparency, reach, efficiency, and compliance.

Throtle combines online and offline data to create a comprehensive, evolving identity graph. This graph offers an anonymized yet detailed view of individuals across various channels and devices.

How to Choose a Data Onboarding Platform

With many solutions for a data onboarding platform, it can be difficult to choose the right solution. The last thing you want to do is invest time in setting up a data onboarding platform and find you’ve made the wrong choice. And because you’re dealing with customer data, you want to make sure you pick the right option the first time so you don’t run into any devastating problems. Here are some things to consider when choosing the right AdTech platform.

• Flexibility: Some options available don’t explain what is happening with your customer data. The only outcome is the impact on your match rate. You’ll find vast differences between the results of different solutions and have no idea why. You should have full visibility over your identity resolution matching algorithm and the factors that impact your match rates. The better solution would be to have full visibility and configuration. This means you’d better understand the performance of match rates and have more control over your settings.
• Storage: Most data onboarding platforms need your customer data to be uploaded to their system. This is done using CSV files or placing the data into an S3 bucket. This can be a lengthy process, and the files must often be in a rigid format. A much better approach is to use a data source you already have, such as a data warehouse. This way, you don’t have to spend time getting data in the right format. You can use it as modeled and remove the need for any uploading process.
• Security: As you deal with sensitive customer data, you want a data onboarding platform you can trust. The problem with most platforms is that they store the data you upload in their system. This adds another layer of risk and duplication for data security and consumer privacy. You want a solution that doesn’t have to add extra risk. The better option is a solution that keeps your data within your data source. One that enriches additional data as audiences are in transit to your advertising destination.

Final Thoughts

Knowing you can increase match rates makes data onboarding an attractive solution. Increasing your match means reaching bigger audiences, which translates into a higher return on ad spend (ROAS). You just need to ensure you're picking the right data onboarding platform.

Which is why Hightouch is a LiveRamp competitor. It can help you increase your match rates without needing CSV uploads. Provide full transparency on how it works. It doesn't store your sensitive customer data. And it's a fraction of the cost some of the other data onboarding platforms charge.

If you want to see how using Hightouch Match Booster can help you improve your ad spend, schedule a meeting with our solutions engineers.