Nobody is a Customer Data Platform native speaker. This is simply because it's complex, still new and constantly evolving. This is why at mediarithmics, we have decided to propose an exhaustive lexicon of the tricky words necessary to explore, select and test any Customer Data Platform. Welcome to the Customer Data Platform A to Z.
The term addressable TV refers to using the individual targeting capabilities of digital advertising to deliver advertising linked to TV content. Addressable TV therefore originally corresponds to non-linear modes of TV consumption (catch-up TV, OTT TV, etc.). However, the concept of addressable TV should be extended to linear TV consumed through the box, which allows for "individual" identification (in fact, a household) of the viewer. The spaces offered by addressable TV can eventually be sold in programmatic mode and in RTB.
Any system used to support advertising activities; in particular, systems that work with digital media.
An ad exchange is a technology platform where buyers and sellers connect to sell and purchase ad inventory. It sits in the middle of the advertising transaction process between supply side platforms (SSPs) (publishers) and demand side platforms (DSPs) (brands).
Analytics is used to describe statistical and mathematical data analysis that clusters, segments, scores and predicts what scenarios are most likely to happen.
The Average Revenue Per User is the average amount of revenue generated by each active user of your app over a given period of time.
A method for communicating between systems (or between components of the same system) that makes requests (“calls”) for the other system to send data or take an action.
Computer processes that mimic human thought processes.
Attributes allow you to define the important characteristics that represent a visitor’s habits, preferences, actions, and engagement with your brand.
The process of estimating the revenue (or other measure) caused by a particular marketing contact (or other interaction with a customer).
A group of visitor profiles that share a set of attribute conditions. The more conditions you use to create an audience, the more specific your audience. Audiences are used to trigger actions.
Processing a set of data that is accumulated over time and fed into the system at once, such as a file containing all the transactions of the previous day. This preludes an immediate response to events reflected in the data, such as someone visiting a website.
Data describing individual actions, such as purchases, web page views, and customer service calls; one person can be associated with many behaviors of the same type.
A California regulation that restricts how personal data is collected and used; it gives individuals rights to reject the commercial use of their data.
The Churn rate is the rate at which a company loses customers annually.
A clean room is a shared and secure environment with external access, between two or more companies, where each company can determine the level of visibility of its data. It is managed by a third-party company or by a company that shares its data and can be operated by a trusted third party.
Delivery of data is commonly accomplished through tags, one of the most popular ways to transmit data from web pages. This type of tracking involves the user’s browser (client) directly sending data to a server. The method is used for collecting and sharing data from your website to your marketing technology vendors and is referred to as tag management.
Cloud-computing is a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using internet technologies.
A permanent code placed in a file on a computer’s hard disk by a website that the computer user has visited. The code uniquely identifies, or “registers,” that user and can be accessed for a number of marketing and site-tracking purposes.
Cookie Matching allows you to match information in a cookie, such as an ID assigned to a user that browsed your website, with a corresponding bidder-specific Google User ID, and construct user lists that can help you make more effective bidding choices.
Cookieless is an expression generally used to designate the fact that in the field of digital marketing, and particularly in that of mobile applications, the cookie cannot be used to "recognize" users as it is done on the traditional web. We therefore speak of a cookieless environment. The term cookieless is also more and more used in the field of web browsers to designate the phenomenon by which third party cookies are more and more threatened by the way browsers work and must progressively be banned or at least strongly limited in their uses.
The process of collecting, classifying, retaining, accessing, and updating individual consent for data use under privacy regulations.
Consent Management System/Platform software manages the consent management process. May be a stand-alone system or part of a larger product such as a CDP
Conversion rate optimization, or CRO, is a form of e-commerce marketing that uses data and best practices to increase the percentage of online visitors who complete a desired behavior. A conversion is often thought of in terms of an online purchase, but can refer to many desired outcomes, such as a website visitor signing up for an email newsletter or participating in a webinar.
A CDP is a technology that collects data in a governed way from sources like web, mobile, in-store, call center, and IoT sources, unifies it to create accurate customer profiles in real time, then makes it accessible to and actionable for other tools and technology.
The collection of tools and strategies that handle customer data standardization and collection, vendor integration and optimization, omnichannel profile enrichment, campaign action triggers, and data management for business intelligence teams.
Customer lifetime value is the amount of money a customer is expected to spend with your company (buying products or services) over their lifetime with your company.
Making use of data. More specifically, sharing customer data with systems that will use it for analytics, personalization, or marketing campaigns.
The process of making data more usable through error correction, standardization, transformations, and other processes. Exact steps will depend on the intended purpose.
Data collaboration is a process of bringing together data from various internal and external sources to unlock combined data insights, for example about customers. These valuable insights can be used to create new products and services, power richer customer experiences, and deliver better business outcomes.
Data-driven marketing is the use of data acquired through customer interactions and third parties to gain insight on customer motivations, preferences and behaviors. Data-driven insights enable organizations to enhance and personalize the customer experience.
The process of adding new information to customer data, most often by importing third-party data and appending it to existing customer profiles.
Dark data stands for the information assets organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes (for example, analytics, business relationships and direct monetizing). Similar to dark matter in physics, dark data often comprises most organizations’ universe of information assets. Thus, organizations often retain dark data for compliance purposes only. Storing and securing data typically incurs more expense (and sometimes greater risk) than value.
The process of controlling how data is collected and used in a system, with particular focus on ensuring data quality
The discipline of data integration comprises the practices, architectural techniques and tools for achieving the consistent access and delivery of data across the spectrum of data subject areas and data structure types in the enterprise to meet the data consumption requirements of all applications and business processes.
A data lake is a concept consisting of a collection of storage instances of various data assets. These assets are stored in a near-exact, or even exact, copy of the source format and are in addition to the originating data stores.
Data management (DM) consists of the practices, architectural techniques, and tools for achieving consistent access to and delivery of data across the spectrum of data subject areas and data structure types in the enterprise, to meet the data consumption requirements of all applications and business processes.
A Data Management Platform provides a centralized dataset that aggregates cookie browsing behavior (unknown prospects) to create large, de-identified audiences for ad targeting across digital channels.
A Data Mart is defined as a subset of Data Warehouse that is focused on a single functional area of an organization. Data Mart helps to enhance user’s response time due to a reduction in the volume of data.
The process of placing data in a consistent format so that all instances of the same item are the same; can be achieved through rules or a standardized data layer.
The process of converting data from one format to another. Enables disparate data to be combined.
Data visualization is the practice of using software tools to display information in graphical form, rather than as raw data that could be more difficult to understand. By representing different kinds of data visually, individuals and teams can readily identify insights and patterns in the stores of information. This is particularly crucial in the age of Big Data, which requires organizations to be able to effectively interpret large amounts of information, often in rapid fashion. Data visualization usually includes 3D graphics or rendering, and is a crucial tool in the fields of marketing, data science, and data analytics.
A massive database where the structure is defined before the data is captured. Think of a huge Excel spreadsheet, with rows and column titles specified in advance. Data Warehouses are easier to analyze than data lakes but generally require technical data skills and specialized software.
Data deduplication is a form of compression that eliminates redundant data on a subfile level, improving storage utilization. In this process, only one copy of the data is stored; all the redundant data will be eliminated, leaving only a pointer to the previous copy of the data. Deduplication can significantly reduce the required disk space, since only the unique data is stored.
Demand Side Platform is technology advertisers use to help them programmatically buy advertising from multiple ad exchanges and ad networks.
Web advertising that appears on website or social media pages and is purchased by contract or by bidding on impressions. May be targeted by web sites or by individuals
A web browser cookie set by the domain of the website that sets the cookie.
Personal data that an organization has acquired directly from an individual.
A European Union regulation that restricts how personal data is collected, used, and protected. It gives individuals rights to consent, review, and demand deletion of personal data.
Targeting of marketing and advertising messages based on the recipient’s passage into or out of a specific physical location, such as entry to a retail store. Sometimes used in combination with data known about an individual.
Targeting of marketing and advertising messages based on the recipient’s location, often in combination with other data known about the individual.
GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. GraphQL provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more, makes it easier to evolve APIs over time, and enables powerful developer tools.
The set of personal data associated with a company’s best customers. Used to define targets for sales and marketing efforts.
Refers to the various ways that customers can engage with your brand anonymously, then associating that behavior back to a known customer. Most sites and apps attempt to keep track of unknown users, such as using cookies, until the user identifies themselves, via logging in or completing a purchase.
The process of connecting a personal identifier to an individual through an intermediary personal identifier (e.g., new device linked to an email address provided by a customer; the device is associated with the customer even though the customer has not herself reported the connection).
The process of gathering data from one system and loading it into another.
Data that indicates how likely a person is to purchase a particular product. Generally based on behaviors such as store visits, social media comments, and consumption of related web content.
A measure that correlates with achievement of specific business goals. Separate KPIs are often defined for each business project or objective.
A way of taking an audience and expanding it to include people with similar qualities. Lookalikes may be used for prospecting and to ensure you’re reaching the largest and most relevant audience possible.
Automated processes that build predictive models with little human assistance.
Marketing technology (also known as martech) is a set of software solutions used by marketing leaders to support mission-critical business objectives and drive innovation within their organizations. MarTech solutions focus on content and customer experience, advertising, direct marketing, marketing management and marketing data and analytics.
Marketing automation is software that assists marketers with customer segmentation, customer data management and campaign management. It provides marketers with the ability to offer real-time, targeted, data-driven campaigns along with enhanced efficiency and productivity.
Master data management (MDM) is a technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets. Master data is the consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describes the core entities of the enterprise including customers, prospects, citizens, suppliers, sites, hierarchies and chart of accounts.
A marketing program where separate campaigns run in different channels (email, web, etc.)
The treatment that a business believes will produce the most desirable result for an individual customer; typically based on a combination of rules and predictive analytics; requires specification of the measure that is desired.
Data collected by physical interaction such as retail purchases, local events, shipments, etc.
A marketing program where the same campaign lets customers interact in whichever channels they choose.
Open data is information or content made freely available to use and redistribute, subject only to the requirement to attribute it to the source. The term also may be used more casually to describe any data that is shared outside the organization and beyond its original intended use, for example, with business partners, customers or industry associations. Formally, data designated as “open” is subject to several conditions and licensing that can be found at opendefinition.org.
Marketing messages delivered through a company’s own channels, such as email or website.
Marketing messages that are purchased, such as paid advertising.
A personal identifier that does not change over time and thus can be used as a permanent “master” ID. It is linked to other personal identifiers which may change (e.g., postal address).
Creating communications that are tailored to a specific individual based on data about that individual.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is data such as an email address, name, date of birth, physical address, or a phone number that can be used to confidently identify a specific person.
A plug-in is an element of a software program that can be added to provide support for specific features or functionality.
Predictive analytics use algorithms and machine learning to anticipate future outcomes based on data. A form of predictive modeling, predictive analytics is the branch of big data analytics that is specifically concerned with revealing insights on what will happen in the future based on what has already occurred in the past. More accurately, it is concerned with what is likely to happen, since predictive analytics is not akin to having a crystal ball.
Responding to an event so quickly that there is no perceptible delay; may refer to the speed of data ingestion, access or decisions
Data reconciliation (DR) is defined as a process of verification of data during data migration. In this process, target data is compared with source data to ensure that the migration architecture is transferring data. Data validation and reconciliation (DVR) means a technology that uses mathematical models to process information.
Scalability is the measure of a system’s ability to increase or decrease in performance and cost in response to changes in application and system processing demands. Examples would include how well a hardware system performs when the number of users is increased, how well a database withstands growing numbers of queries, or how well an operating system performs on different classes of hardware. Enterprises that are growing rapidly should pay special attention to scalability when evaluating hardware and software.
In machine learning, scoring is the process of applying an algorithmic model built from a historical dataset to a new dataset in order to uncover practical insights that will help solve a business problem.
Personal data that an organization has acquired through a direct relationship with the organization that collected it as first-party data
The term segmented TV advertising refers to the phenomenon of digitalization of TV advertising, which makes it possible to personalize advertising messages for a given spot space according to different audience segments. Previously prohibited, segmented TV advertising has been authorized in France since a decree released on August 7, 2020, and has been made marketable for the first time by TV advertising agencies in the 2021 GTCs.
Segmented TV advertising allows you to contextualize part or all of the messages according to the location of audience segments, for example.
Server-side data management, also known as cloud delivery, is when a pixel or tag sends data into your web server (or a different type of server), then your web server passes that data to the destination system/server. This data could be used by a marketing automation platform, analytics provider, personalization tool or another type of execution system.
An aggregated, holistic view of the data an organization retains on its customers, discernible at the individual level.
A supply-side platform (SSP) is an AdTech software that helps publishers and other advertisers automate the management, selling, and optimization of ad inventory (audio, video, display, mobile) on their web and mobile properties. SSP is also known as a sell-side platform.
Data that is presented and stored in a fixed format where each element is in a specified location, such as the columns of a relational database table or the fields of a data file.
A technology that makes it simple for users to implement, manage, and maintain tags on their digital properties via an easy-to-use web interface.
Personal data that an organization has acquired through a marketplace relationship with an organization that acquired it directly or indirectly.
Data that is presented and stored in a format where the elements are not defined, such as a block of text, video, or audio files.
A description of the steps that an agent takes to complete a business task. Used to illustrate the capabilities a system needs to support a task and to illustrate the tasks a system may support.
A User Point is a marketing representation of the user.
When a CDP automatically combines the attributes from related profiles from different channels into a new master profile that replaces the others.
On the internet, a walled garden is an environment that controls the user's access to network-based content and services. In effect, the walled garden directs the user's navigation within particular areas to enable access to a selection of material or prevent access to other material.
Any data that a customer proactively and deliberately shares, such as privacy or contact preferences.
