Our LiveRamp for Developers summer sessions have come to a close. If you missed out, you can view the full session (or any of the previous sessions) on demand by registering. We started off with the launch of our developer portal, a continuation from our first RampUp for Developers sessions last year. We then followed up on our data science from last fall’s virtual RampUp, and lastly, we took a look at each of the individual APIs that are currently available on the Developer Portal.
Take a look at a brief overview of each session and learn about the options available to explore each of the different solutions discussed.
Session 1: Developer Portal and API introductions
The LiveRamp Developer Portal launched on July 13, and is the central location for technical resources and tools—applications, APIs, and corresponding documentation and guides—that allow users (customers and partners) to utilize different parts of the LiveRamp platform in a more flexible and programmatic manner to suit their individual needs.
We first launched with the APIs that were discussed in the individual API-focused sessions, and are actively working on adding more, as well as introducing additional product categories. Aside from APIs, we will be expanding to offerings for data science and other programs and features for all of our technical audiences.
Session 2: Data Science with Data Fleets
One of the problems DataFleets and LiveRamp are trying to solve is the growing need to collaborate. Walled gardens and other large entities are keeping data mostly to themselves. There’s also the sensitivity of internet protocol (IP) around data. Even with a data set that is not guarded by privacy regulations, customers don’t want to expose that data in collaboration use cases. For example, financial services customers don’t want to reveal their trading algorithms, healthcare professionals don’t want to reveal exactly where they’re investing, and retailers don’t want to expose pricing and promotion strategies to partners.
When driving impact through innovation, we must take a holistic approach to how solutions are built. This is a challenge because every approach, and the corresponding technology involved, is highly complex. Putting in the hard work of pulling out the best of each of these technologies and applying them in ways that drive impact in the variety of applicable use cases is necessary to build a commercially ready platform in this space. This has been created with DataFleets, which is now being incorporated within LiveRamp solutions.
Individual API-focused sessions:
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Session 3: Identity: AbiliTec API
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The AbiliTec API is a secure, real-time interface that provides direct access to AbiliTec, the LiveRamp industry-leading offline identity-matching service. When you use the AbiliTec API to send directly identifiable data (DID) for a consumer or place, AbiliTec attempts to match that data to existing records in the AbiliTec Identity Graph.
We generate two kinds of IDs from our API: a maintained ID, or maintained link, when an input piece of DID matches to a node within the AbiliTec knowledge base. These can help a client consolidate or link data. In the case that we don’t have that representation, entity, or touch point in a graph, we’ll return a derived link. A derived link represents an entity that is not recognized in the graph. Derived IDs are algorithmically derived based on input data—upon the same entity input, the API will consistently output the same derived link. The use case for a derived link is to maximize connectivity, even if an identifier is not recognized by the LiveRamp graph. This allows clients to still join on input data sets for consistent linking across files.
The API will always generate a consumer link, address link, and household link for whatever input data is received, and we generate the format of those links. We’ll also generate a set of match metadata, which is a collection of data illustrating how we matched to the input data, and how we got to a singular link. The match confidence is given as an enumeration of match components.
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Session 4: Identity: Retrieval API
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The Retrieval API allows you to match your data to the LiveRamp Identity Graph and receive RampIDs. Whereas you can only connect AbiliTec Links with “offline” identifiers, such as postal addresses, emails, and phone numbers, RampIDs have the advantage of being able to connect to both offline identifiers as well as online, pseudonymous identifiers such as third party cookies, mobile advertising IDs, CTVIDs, and other custom partner identifiers. This is super powerful, as it allows RampID users to build a complete, 360-degree view of their consumer, both in the known offline and pseudonymous online space.
While RampIDs are person-based, the true value and use case for RampIDs is for connectivity purposes. RampIDs are LiveRamp’s pseudonymous identifier that enables our clients to use their data safely and effectively across the ecosystem.
It’s important for LiveRamp to maximize the security of our client’s data as well as our own identifier, so LiveRamp encodes their RampIDs to be specific for each client. The partner encoding is a four-digit value that is specific to each client and ensures there’s no such thing as a universal ID that represents a person. The person-based capability of RampID is critical for consolidation and analytics purposes.
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Session 5: Activation API
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Activation API is one of our foundational APIs, enabling programmatic activation from your own marketing and campaign management applications. The new version of the Activation API was released in October 2020, in open beta. This API allows you to view, configure, and manage any of the 400+ destinations LiveRamp works with, including Facebook, Google, The Trade Desk, and others; distribute your segments to multiple destinations; and allows resellers the ability to manage their customers. One of the key enhancements of this API is the ability to view segment delivery status, which has been a frequent request from many of our clients.
The Activation API streamlines the process of segment distribution by eliminating the time and resources required to build and maintain integrations. When your customer selects a consumer data segment in your application UI to distribute to a platform, LiveRamp anonymizes the data, matches the anonymized data to the platform’s devices, and then delivers the resulting devices to the platform.
You can set up the integration between your application and the Activation API to provide basic integration where a customer can distribute one segment to one destination platform at a time. You can also choose to provide advanced integration, where a customer can distribute multiple segments to multiple destinations.
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Session 6: Data Marketplace: Buyer API
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The Data Marketplace exists to bring both data suppliers and data buyers together. LiveRamp provides a platform to easily transact, buy, and sell data for various use cases, all linked to LiveRamp’s people-based identifier, the RampID. At LiveRamp, we’re focused on data democratization, and the Data Marketplace allows us to make it as easy and as seamless as possible to buy and sell data.
The LiveRamp Data Marketplace Buyer API allows platforms to embed LiveRamp Data Marketplace segments in their application, seamlessly connecting their users to the LiveRamp Data Marketplace. The Buyer API automates third-party data workflows, driving cost savings for platforms while providing more options for customers.
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Session 7: Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS): ATS API
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ATS connects publisher and brand identity to shape media experiences and measure effectiveness. ATS helps publishers recognize known users on their sites in real time, enabling data-informed targeting and increasing the value of your inventory.
On the publisher side, we see that when publishers enrich their inventory using identity, they’re able to achieve better monetization. This is true for inventory that has other inferior identifiers, like third-party cookies or device IDs, but it’s a step change for inventory that can’t be appropriately monetized by legacy identity technology. In both cases, ATS is really a game-changer, and the numbers bear this out.
If we look at the other side of this marketplace, marketers also see improved outcomes when they leverage ATS infrastructure. They see better performance, which is driven in large part based on the aspects I just mentioned; the ability to effectively reach users across a range of devices; minimized audience loss; and maximized audience region frequency.
In addition to accessing ATS-enabled publisher inventory, Marketers can also benefit from ATS more directly. By deploying ATS on their digital properties, they can plug into the authenticated ecosystems to power retargeting, personalization, measurement, and audience-building segmentation.
Our LiveRamp for Developers summer session is at its end, but it’s the beginning of a very important stage for LiveRamp as we continue our journey as an enterprise SaaS player. As we transition beyond being a simple AdTech player, our APIs will allow users to build apps leveraging key LiveRamp capabilities separately.
The results of these efforts will help increase user autonomy, improve time and cost savings, and open opportunities as well as additional revenue by leveling up capabilities not as readily available in the current state of the system. This will allow our users to incorporate the APIs into their own applications and build on top of the LiveRamp platform.
As we look further to the future, we hope to add more advanced portal features to make the customer and user experience more streamlined, and we plan to make the portal collaborative. We’ll also introduce additional product categories and APIs.
Moving forward, we plan to continue hosting similar sessions and series, and you can expect to see our partners and customers talk about how they are using the APIs and incorporating them into their applications, and how that is helping to address their business needs.
In addition, we will likely have industry- or use case-focused sessions in the future. If these are of interest to you, please let us know by contacting us, and we will be sure to notify you when they are available. We’ll also announce these on the Developer Portal, as well as on our engineering blog, so be sure to subscribe to stay up to date.