Why data onboarding matters
Many companies have rich customer data from offline interactions:- Purchase history from retail stores
- Loyalty program memberships
- Call center interactions
- Direct mail campaigns
- Digital reach for offline customers: Find your store customers online
- Personalization at scale: Apply offline insights to digital experiences
- Closed-loop measurement: Connect digital campaigns to offline conversions
How data onboarding works
1. Prepare and anonymize offline data
Data onboarding starts with your offline customer file—typically including emails, phone numbers, and customer attributes. Before any matching occurs, personally identifiable information (PII) must be pseudonymized:- Hash email addresses and phone numbers
- Remove or mask direct identifiers (names, addresses)
- Retain only the attributes needed for activation
Narrative requires PII to be hashed before upload. See Hashing PII for Upload for formatting requirements.
2. Match to online identifiers
Pseudonymized customer data is matched to online identifiers through identity resolution:| Offline Identifier | Matched To |
|---|---|
| Hashed email | Mobile ad IDs, cookies, UID2 |
| Hashed phone | Mobile ad IDs, UID2 |
| Postal address | Device graphs (probabilistic) |
- Deterministic: Direct link observed (e.g., user logged in with email on mobile app)
- Probabilistic: Inferred from signals (e.g., shared household IP address)
3. Activate in digital channels
Once matched, customer segments can be activated across digital platforms:- Programmatic display and video
- Social media advertising
- Connected TV
- Retail media networks
Benefits of data onboarding
Boost media reach
By appending online identifiers to your customer file, you gain additional touchpoints to reach customers across devices and channels—not just where they gave you their email.Improve personalization
Bring offline insights online. A customer who purchased in-store can receive relevant digital ads, while someone who returned a product can be excluded from promotions.Enable omni-channel measurement
Combining offline and online data provides a complete view of customer journeys. Measure how digital campaigns drive store visits, or how in-store experiences influence online behavior.Power advanced analytics
Onboarded data enables analysis across the full customer journey. Understand how offline and online touchpoints interact and influence each other, rather than analyzing channels in silos.Challenges in data onboarding
Privacy compliance
Offline customer records often contain PII that’s regulated under GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws. Mitigate risk by:- Hashing all identifiers before sharing
- Maintaining appropriate consent records
- Working with compliant onboarding partners
Match rates
Not all offline customers will match to online identifiers. Typical match rates range from 30-70% depending on:- Data quality and recency
- Identifier types available
- Target platform coverage
Data freshness
Customer data changes over time. Email addresses become invalid, people move, devices are replaced. Regular refresh of onboarded data maintains accuracy.Cost and complexity
Traditional onboarding services can be expensive and require long-term commitments. They may also charge for records that don’t match, making ROI difficult to predict.Data onboarding in Narrative
Narrative simplifies data onboarding with transparent matching and flexible activation:Self-service upload
Upload your hashed customer file directly to the platform without intermediaries.Transparent matching
See which identity providers match your data and at what rates. Choose which matches to activate based on quality and coverage.Flexible activation
Activate matched audiences to multiple destinations:- The Trade Desk (with automatic UID2 generation)
- Other DSPs and ad platforms
- Analytics environments