Methods for tracking user data

The easiest way for DMP to collect the necessary information about the client's audience is to add tags to his own site. The data obtained in this way is third-party data (third-party data link), and tags are snippets (code fragments) that are inserted into the code of the web page itself.

Once a site is linked to DMP, the platform starts collecting data about its visitors. And it often does it the old and tried-and-true way: by setting JavaScript pixels on landing pages.

Tags can be divided into several categories:

User activity tags are used to record events committed by visitors on the site. Tags can record the name of the action itself, location, and parameters. Parameters are pieces of information that are passed back to the DMP and that still need to be manually predefined. This can be absolutely any data available on the web page: order volume, purchase receipt, visitor ID, etc.

Media tags are used to track impressions and clicks on display ads. And not unlike web session recording tools, DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, and other platforms also collect this information, but DMPs need it primarily to improve programmatic targeting.

If DMP collects audience data from websites directly using tags, then to track the activity of mobile app users, you need to insert code through the SDK. Then, as usual, the received data is sent to the DMP server. DMP platforms have SDKs for iOS and Android.

Synchronizing cookies

Advertising platforms - DMPs, SSPs, DSPs, ad networks, ad exchanges - and other information providers often exchange pre-made audience segments with each other created using cookies. They are text files that store information about the content viewed, pages visited by the user, etc. Cookies are created by the browser each time the user visits the site and are stored on his computer.

Linking cookies to user id

Due to their many functions, cookies can theoretically store a huge amount of information, but the files themselves are limited in size. To solve this problem, some cookies stored on users' computers contain only their unique ID. This allows advertisers and other advertising platforms to store the rest of the information on their own systems. This allows not only to make the size of cookies smaller, but also to receive and analyze more information about the user. And the main advantage of using an identifier is the ability for advertisers to use cookie syncing to replenish audience data when advertising is launched.

In mobile applications, instead of cookies that identify the user in the browser, the data is associated with identifiers (IDs) of mobile devices: AAID for Android and IDFA for iOS.

How the process is carried out:

The user visits a site that contains advertising;

The browser sends a request to the advertising exchange - Ad Exchange;

In turn, the ad exchange responds to the request and creates a third-party cookie;

The ad exchange redirects the ad request to the pixel URL from the DMP side, passing the user ID in the URL parameter. DMP reads its own cookie (if there is already a user with that ID in its database) or creates a new one and stores it in a table;

If the synchronization is bidirectional, then the DMP sends its own ID information to the ad exchange in the URL parameter. The ad exchange receives this request, matches the received cookie with its own, and stores the DMP ID along with its own ID in a table;

API

DMP platforms can also be used as a tool to track user activity on website using API web services that exchange JSON objects from the web server to the DMP server and vice versa. A large amount of information can be transferred in this way, but using the API requires careful configuration and a lot of time.

Web Services APIs are used to exchange data between web servers and DMP. This sharing option is ideal for companies with multiple data warehouses.