Questions You Should Ask Potential Identity Partners

Selecting the right identity partner is crucial for healthcare marketers and brands aiming to enhance security, streamline user experiences, and comply with regulatory standards. Choosing an identity partner goes beyond basic credentials; it requires a thorough evaluation to ensure a perfect fit for your company's unique needs. By asking the right questions, organizations can uncover critical insights about potential partners, ensuring a robust, scalable, and future-proof identity solution. This blog delves into the essential questions that should guide your decision-making process, helping you navigate the complexities of identity management and find a partner that aligns with your strategic goals.

What Is the identity provider's approach to targeting? Do they deploy individual or household (cluster) targeting?

Accuracy is key to understanding your audience and to executing successful performance campaigns. If the identity graph is built on household clusters, you will inevitably make the wrong assumptions about the people who live there. As a result, you’ll reach a great number of people who likely aren’t your intended audience.

This shotgun approach simply isn’t necessary in today’s age of advanced data science. In contrast, an identity graph built at the individual level will drive performance and add efficiency to your marketing spend.

Is the identity graph built primarily on deterministic or probabilistic data?

Don’t believe the claims that there isn’t enough deterministic data available to build a highly accurate identify graph. There is. And it is much more accurate than probabilistic data.

Probabilistic data still has value for aggregated group outcomes. However, deterministic data drives the appropriateness of different marketing messages to a single individual. For instance, deterministic data ensures that you are marketing the correct health products to someone with a specific condition.

How does the identity provider view accuracy and scalability?

It’s generally assumed in healthcare marketing circles that scale comes at the cost of accuracy. That’s true when an identity graph is built at the household level. It’s not true when the starting point is an individual user based on deterministic data points. With the right data science approaches, data points can be combined to validate audience members at scale.

Validation shouldn’t be a static process. An identity graph should be dynamically maintained and updated on a continuous basis. This ensures matches are highly accurate. It also settles the point that scale doesn’t need to come at the cost of accuracy.

How often does the provider rebuild or refresh their identity graph with new data?

Ideally, an identity graph should be updated daily and completely rebuilt monthly. While that sounds like a lot of work, it’s essential. Why? Across the entire U.S. population, people move, change their phone numbers, start new jobs and are assigned new email addresses daily. If the identity isn’t updated on a continuous basis, accuracy is diminished.

Is the identity graph a core asset to their business or is it ancillary?

This is a critically important question that every marketer must ask. As mentioned in the introduction, many companies are seeking to get in on the identity game by relabeling their marketing database as an identity graph. But they’re two different technologies and serve two different use cases.

They also require two different approaches to data science. An identity graph must be built from the ground up for the purpose of resolving identity on an individual level. There’s just no getting around that requirement.

Where do they get their data from? How many data providers do they partner with?

In the identity graph sector, overlap is good. Overlap means plenty of opportunities to validate or discard suspect data. A good identity graph provider will partner with dozens of data providers, and have data that includes postal, email, mobile ad IDs and connected tv identifiers. Additionally, ask about privacy audits to validate that the data providers follow privacy rules.

How transparent is the provider? Are they willing to license their graph? Do they share the actual data with clients?

Be wary of any identity graph provider that won’t share their actual data with you. It’s often a sign they’re hiding something. Typically, such companies don’t want the market to know that its graph is built at the household, not the individual, level.

An identity provider that stands by its accuracy claims is one that isn’t afraid of transparency across its methodology, reporting and pricing.

Do they offer match and identity tests?

At the end of the day, partnering with an identity graph provider means making an investment. You want to know upfront whether that investment will deliver the dividends you need. To ensure accuracy, you’ll need a data test that verifies matches and identifies data duplication and overlap.

Make sure your provider is willing to structure the test with your specific business goals in mind. Your goal could be to shed light on website visitors or match MAIDs to a household. To conduct tests, you will need to spend some time cleaning the data, getting rid of duplicates and filling in the gaps. This is normal.

Once the data hygiene process is completed, your provider should run its match process and report the results back to you. If you want to test a data subset, the provider should be willing to send you the results so you can conduct your own evaluation.

Selecting the right identity partner is a decision that can significantly impact security, efficiency, and regulatory compliance. By asking the right questions, you can ensure that your chosen partner not only meets your current needs but also supports your future growth and technological advancements. A thorough evaluation process will lead to a partnership built on trust, reliability, and mutual success. As you embark on this journey, remember that the right identity partner is an investment in your company's long-term resilience and digital transformation. Choose wisely, and your business will thrive in the ever-evolving digital landscape. For more information on Throtle and our identity solutions, contact us today.