LiveRamp: What It Is & Why Marketers Use It 2025

The world's most innovative companies are heavily powered by insights, spending a large chunk of their marketing budget on acquiring consumer data.

Yet, most of the data collected simply goes unused.

Organizations struggle to unify, control, and activate data across all relevant touchpoints to power optimal customer experiences and ultimately generate more revenue.

This struggle can be attributed to two main factors: scattered touchpoints and siloed data.

Marketers depend on a wide variety of tools to execute a strategy. With each new platform, even more data is generated. Turning these amounts of data into actionable insights in real-time becomes increasingly complicated.

This has given rise to systems like LiveRamp, which can connect disparate data sets and empower marketers to make effective data-driven decisions.

In this guide, we will take a look at what LiveRamp is, what it does, and how it helps marketers drive better results with data.

What Is LiveRamp?

LiveRamp.com integrates with major ad platforms, data warehouses, and analytics tools, allowing businesses to seamlessly onboard data for targeted campaigns and cross-channel reporting.

Brands use LiveRamp to enhance audience segmentation, personalization, and measurement by leveraging both first-party and third-party data. This ensures precise targeting while minimizing data silos.

How Does LiveRamp Work?

The key to understanding your customers journeys and optimizing their experiences lies in your ability to get a full view of their interactions at all stages. But this is not as easy as it sounds.

So, how does LiveRamp help marketers achieve this?

Let’s say you’re a marketer at a CPG brand and want to launch a people-based marketing campaign. You want to find customers on all channels, websites, social media, search engines, CTV, emails, but all you have is their offline data. 

LiveRamp allows you to onboard this offline data to marketing platforms. Here’s how it works:

1. Data onboarding and ingestion: Businesses upload their first-party data through SFTP or LiveRamp Connect from CRMs, websites, or offline data sources. This data is matched and encrypted to RampID, a unique identifier that maintains consumer privacy while preparing it for cross-channel activation
2. Identity resolution: LiveRamp’s identity resolution technology connects fragmented data points by matching them to RampID across devices, channels, and platforms. This process enables the creation of a cohesive consumer view without exposing personally identifiable information (PII) which is critical for healthcare and other industries.
3. Data activation: LiveRamp integrates with 500+ data destinations, including major ad platforms, DSPs, social networks, and analytics tools, allowing businesses to target specific audience segments with personalized campaigns.
4. Privacy compliance and security: LiveRamp ensures that all data collaboration and activation processes adhere to strict privacy regulations like HIPAA and GDPR. The platform anonymizes data, using encryption to ensure secure transfers between partners and platforms.
5. Campaign measurement: With the data activated, LiveRamp enables campaign performance tracking across platforms. Marketers can measure conversions, optimize segments, and refine targeting strategies based on real-time performance insights.
   

What is LiveRamp’s Data Onboarding?

Who Can Benefit from LiveRamp Data Onboarding?

LiveRamp’s data onboarding empowers a wide range of industries to bridge the gap between offline and online data:

• Retailers and ecommerce brands: Use offline purchase history and loyalty data to create personalized digital campaigns.
• Financial Services and Banks: Activate first-party customer data while maintaining compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR.‍
• Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Companies: Use anonymized patient and healthcare data for targeted outreach, ensuring HIPAA compliance.‍
• Telecommunication Providers: Integrate CRM and subscription data into programmatic campaigns to reduce churn and upsell services.‍
• CPG and Consumer Goods Companies: Use in-store purchase data to optimize online ad spend and boost e-commerce conversions.

What Is RampID?

RampID collects data from various channels and devices and matches it to the relevant customer view using its identity graph. This enables marketers to see every piece of data related to each customer. 

RampID extends beyond individual-level identification, offering B2B enterprise identity capabilities that connect data at the company level. This enables marketers to link firmographic data, professional profiles, and offline interactions, creating unified, actionable insights for account-based marketing and other B2B strategies​.

RampID and the Cookie-less Future

In the last few years, ad tech industry experts have speculated about the inevitable end of the third-party cookie system. LiveRamp’s RampID is a future-proof solution because of its cookie-independent identity framework.

“LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution has become the industry standard for identity in a post cookie world, and Safe Haven® is game changing for the future of data-driven customer experience” —Scott Howe, LiveRamp CEO

In anticipation of the shift away from the cookie-based model, LiveRamp partnered with many publishers and tech platforms to roll out a people-based infrastructure that helps marketers thrive in the cookie-less future.

These include:

• Authentication Traffic Solution (ATS): ATS allows publishers to engage visitors in a transparent exchange of value—offering access to premium content in return for authenticated data, such as email addresses. This ensures high-quality, first-party data collection without reliance on third-party cookies.
• Preference and Consent Management Tools: ELiveRamp equips publishers with tools to build trust by giving visitors control over their data. These tools let users specify how much data they want to share, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and fostering user engagement.
• RampID (formerly IdentityLink): Uses Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to connect marketers to consumers. This empowers them to deliver optimal customer experiences without relying on third-party cookies

With these tools, LiveRamp helps businesses future-proof their marketing operations, ensuring compliance, accuracy, and customer engagement in a privacy-first digital ecosystem.

How to Use LiveRamp for Marketing Attribution

LiveRamp enables advertisers to attribute offline transactions and events to online advertising on certain platforms.

The process involves uploading transaction data to LiveRamp, which then matches the data to the identifiers that the platform expects. The platform receives the matched data and determines which events can be attributed to their advertising.

The attribution process generally consists of these steps:

1. The advertiser uploads transaction data (usually offline PII) to LiveRamp.
2. LiveRamp matches the input PII to the identifiers expected by the destination platform.
3. LiveRamp delivers the transaction data, now tied to the appropriate identifier, to the platform.
4. The platform matches the identifiers to their users (events matched - unattributed).
5. The platform determines which events can be attributed to their advertising (events matched - attributed).

Another use case is LiveRamp’s DV360 offline conversions attribution program. LiveRamp helps attribute offline conversions from DV360 by enabling marketers to integrate their offline transaction data with their Campaign Manager accounts. 

Here’s how it works:

1. LiveRamp receives authorization and user access from the marketer to send data to their Campaign Manager 360 account.
2. The marketer then sets up Floodlight activities and custom Floodlight variables, if necessary, and provides LiveRamp with the generated IDs.
3. LiveRamp matches the data and delivers it to the Google DV360 account, allowing the marketer to view the attribution analysis, which showcases the ROI of their advertising campaigns across both online and offline channels.

In addition, LiveRamp enables cross-device and cross-channel attribution. LiveRamp's identity graph accurately connects consumers' various online and offline identifiers, such as email addresses, cookies, and mobile device IDs.

By creating a unified and anonymized customer profile, LiveRamp allows marketers to understand the customer journey across different devices and channels.

Beyond LiveRamp: Exploring Alternatives for Attribution and Marketing Analytics

While LiveRamp excels in merging, activating, and operationalizing first- and third-party data, it doesn’t fully meet the needs of marketers and analysts focused on comprehensive data analysis.

Users still need a separate marketing intelligence platform to explore insights, align data from multiple sources, and manage reporting workflows manually. This adds complexity and can delay decision-making.

Other operational challenges include:

• Complex integrations: Integrating LiveRamp with existing data ecosystems can require significant effort, particularly for companies with unique tech stacks.
• Limited real-time capabilities: While LiveRamp supports batch data processing effectively, it lacks real-time data ingestion and activation, making it challenging for teams that rely on up-to-the-minute analytics and fast campaign optimizations.
• Limited Native Analytics Tools: LiveRamp provides identity resolution and data activation, but it falls short in offering robust built-in analytics.

Improvado addresses these challenges by offering a comprehensive marketing analytics platform that automates data collection, transformation, and visualization, enabling near-real-time data-driven decision-making.

Improvado integrates with over 500 data sources, including LiveRamp, ensuring seamless alignment of all marketing data.

Improvado’s platform provides real-time data access, eliminating delays in campaign adjustments, and includes built-in dashboards for performance monitoring.

This allows marketing teams to focus on insights and optimization without juggling multiple tools or processes, streamlining operations and improving ROI.

Frequently Asked Questions