Understanding Match Rates and Addressable Audience Sizes
After uploading a file to the Quantcast Platform, users often want to understand the "match rate", how much of their uploaded audience is addressable for targeting within the platform. This essentially helps determine whether there is sufficient scale for the intended campaign.
Quantcast works with LiveRamp to match audience data, and it’s important to note that LiveRamp matches based on devices rather than individual users. As a result, Quantcast focuses on Addressable Audience size, the number of measurable devices available for targeting, rather than a one-to-one user match rate.
In many cases, Quantcast is able to match more devices than the number of records in the original file.
Determining the Addressable Audience Size
Once the audience has been ingested and is available in the Quantcast Platform, you can view the Addressable Audience size by navigating to, Audience Catalog > Customer Audiences, then selecting the appropriate Audience Name or Segment ID.
This will open Audience Insights, where the Addressable Audience size is displayed at the top. This number reflects Quantcast's estimate of how many devices are measurable and targetable based on the uploaded data. Users can compare the Addressable Audience size to the number of Unique Records listed in LiveRamp Connect.
Be sure to check the selected date range. You can adjust it to extend the lookback window for broader insights.
Why the Addressable Audience May Appear Larger Than Your Original File
The Addressable Audience size is larger than the original file size you uploaded due to LiveRamp’s matching process. During ingestion, LiveRamp matches the records from your file to relevant devices. In some cases, LiveRamp can match a single record to multiple devices. For instance, if a user’s email address is associated with multiple personal devices, such as an iPhone, iPad, and laptop, each device is counted as a separate targetable match. For example, the email [email protected] might be linked to three devices, resulting in three matched targets. This matching ensures you can engage users across multiple devices, maximizing the impact and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Why the Addressable Audience May Appear Smaller Than Your Original File
During ingestion, LiveRamp works to match records from your file to relevant devices. In some cases, valid device matches may not be found for certain records, leading to a final audience size smaller than the initial file. While this reduction can occur, it helps ensure that the final audience consists only of accurately matched, high-quality targets for your campaign.
The most common reasons for a invalid device matches are:
The data ingested does not represent the country the user would like to geo-target. For instance, if the user would like to geo-target the US but has uploaded data representative of Italy, there will be a low number of matches.
The data ingested is not up to date and therefore LiveRamp was unable to find a relative match.