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– Navigating a mobile site
– Tips for easy navigation
– Stages of website menu development
We’ll tell you what CDP platform is, how it is organized, what tasks it solves for business and what you need to develop it
Customer data platform (CDP) is a customer data platform. A system that collects data from different sources, builds user portraits, and helps personalize content and advertising.
Businesses have multiple touchpoints with customers: website, app, mail, sms, social media, offline stores. CDP accumulates information from these channels: it monitors user behavior on the website and in the app, correlates it with purchase history and activity in social networks. The platform collects this data into a single client profile, encrypts it and makes it suitable for other services.
CDP data can be used by analytics systems and advertising platforms like Google Ads. This approach helps to more accurately segment audiences and personalize content such as product recommendations, advertising, newsletters, and special offers.
CDPs work with data provided by users themselves — 1st-party cookies. Whereas most advertising platforms work with data that the site collects about users without their consent — 3rd-party cookies.
Third-party cookies are stored not only by advertisers, but also by advertising systems that have mediated advertising campaigns. Information from these cookies can be purchased by any business to customize targeted advertising. The use of third-party cookies has been legally restricted to protect users from fraudsters, and browsers have begun blocking them.
After 2023, marketers can only use 1st-party cookies — they are created and used by the site itself with the user’s consent. CDPs work mainly with such data and allow advertising campaigns without breaking the law.
In the article «Cookies: what are they, what are they for, how do they increase sales» we told in detail how third-party cookies help businesses. In another article, we also explained that third-party cookies are not the only way to get information about customers and discussed the ETag approach. It allows you to identify a user through a cache ID.
In this article, we will tell you how the CDP platform is organized, what tasks it is suitable for, and what you need to develop it.
How CDP works
- Tracks events and collects user profiles. Events are any user actions. For example, page views on a website or app, clicking on links in an email, viewing and clicking on product cards, adding and removing items from a cart or making a purchase.
As soon as a user starts interacting with any brand channel, the platform gets to work. CDP tracks events and categorizes them into profiles: it understands which user took an action and adds information to their portrait.
To get the data, the platform provides websites and applications with APIs to collect events. Collection points can be customized. For example, you can collect only contact information or track a customer’s behavior until they decide to make a purchase.
- Reconcile identifiers. An identifier helps correlate a customer’s personal data with their history of interaction with the site. They can be stable or unstable. 3rd-party cookies provide unstable identifiers. A visitor can clean them and become a new guest for the site. CDP works with User IDs, or stable identifiers — they are assigned once, change only on request, and allow for more personalized campaigns.
To match, standardize, and validate user information, the platform uses identity resolution technology. Attributes of a single user are linked together under a unique identifier. This prevents the system from creating two different profiles if the same person first visits the site from a smartphone and then from a laptop.
- Stores and updates profiles. Provides a database for user data. If a customer changes address or preferences, CDP changes this information in the repository as well.
- Segmented data. Categorizes users into groups based on characteristics that are important to a particular brand. For example, by location or propensity to make a purchase in summer or winter. Useful for more targeted marketing campaigns.
- Activates user IDs on third-party platforms. CDP acts as a smart base or repository that is integrated with other systems. They can analyze data, identify patterns, generate reports and create strategies. Data activation helps link the information in CDP to analytics systems and advertising services. The platform asks third-party systems in what form to provide them with information, prepares, encrypts data for each user and creates hashed identifiers. Then it transfers them through APIs or other integration mechanisms to third-party systems. This simplifies data management and improves the quality of analytics.
