Introducing Match Booster Anonymous: ad retargeting for a cookieless world

Remember the days when anonymous retargeting was one of the most effective and scaleable advertising strategies?

All you had to do was drop a pixel on your website, create an audience, and watch high-intent conversions flow in.

But suddenly… everything changed.

Ad blockers rose in popularity, browsers implemented cookie restrictions, and Apple clamped down on mobile identification.

With no ability to identify anonymous visitors in ad platforms, budgets were reallocated away from anonymous retargeting, and its reputation languished. Until today…

Introducing Match Booster Anonymous

Today, we are excited to release Match Booster Anonymous, an identity solution designed to find and convert anonymous visitors and households in a cookieless world.

Match Booster Anonymous is available for activation on Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, The Trade Desk, Amazon, Roku, and more.

The Challenge: Navigating a Privacy-First World

Google’s announcement that Chrome will deprecate 3rd party cookies is just one in a long series of changes that have slowly eaten away at retargeting performance.

First came the ad blockers. Then, privacy-focused browsers and operating systems released Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and App Tracking Transparency (ATT), making website and app retargeting more difficult. Finally, the last domino is about to fall: Google moving to deprecate 3rd party cookies, impacting the last 60%+ of the world’s browser usage.

These changes are a boon for privacy-focused consumers but make tracking, targeting, and converting anonymous web and app visitors increasingly difficult for advertisers. Anonymous retargeting is left ineffective and harder to scale as match rates have plummeted and audience sizes have shrunk.

Advertising platforms like Meta and TikTok have responded by providing APIs to upload and match known audiences and conversion events while encouraging performance advertisers to focus on collecting first-party customer data to use to reach and convert high-intent visitors. But with only a fraction of website visitors identifying themselves on websites (especially publishers), these strategies still have significant limitations.

The Solution: Person-Based Retargeting

With Match Booster Anonymous, advertisers can now find and reach the people and devices behind each anonymous visit without being as restricted by ad blockers, browsers, or operating systems.

Match Booster Anonymous matches 1st-party anonymous identifiers (like IP addresses) to rich user profiles in our cookieless identity graph which we sync to your ad destinations as audiences using trusted person-level identifiers like hashed emails and device IDs, providing expanded person-based retargeting audiences.

This process avoids the traditional hurdles of browser-side tracking without the need for cookies or pseudonymous identifiers, increasing match rates and audience sizes.

Using Match Booster Anonymous, a global media conglomerate was able to match 55% of their IP-based traffic to one or more addressable profiles in our identity graph, significantly improving retargeting audience sizes and scale.

Key Features

Cookieless Identity Graph: By enriching first-party anonymous identifiers with rich, privacy-compliant profiles, including hashed emails and device IDs, Match Booster Anonymous offers a robust solution for retargeting in a post-cookie world.

Broad Platform Activation: Reach your audiences across the major walled gardens, DSPs, and CTV ad platforms, including Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, The Trade Desk, Amazon, Roku, and more.

Quality & Reach: Machine learning algorithms rigorously clean and match observed linkages between anonymous and known identities, improving retargeting audience sizes while ensuring audience quality.

Privacy-First: Profiles are sourced from partnerships with the largest and most reputable identity providers. Your data is never stored within the Match Booster platform, ensuring your customer’s data remains private.

Built-In Compliance: Audiences are activated directly from your source of truth in the data warehouse. With a few filters and field mappings, you can honor data sharing and privacy preferences and ensure legal compliance.

Redefining Retargeting

Recover anonymous abandoned carts

Convert anonymous abandoned carts into paying customers by expanding your retargeting using real person-based identifiers to improve addressability and reach without cookies.

Expanded household targeting

Advertisers can utilize Match Booster Anonymous to broaden their targeting from individual identities to entire households, identifying and targeting new addressable profiles and devices.

This is a novel addition to traditional household identity strategies, which typically group known profiles together based on residence. Rather than simply reconciling existing records, Match Booster Anonymous finds profiles and devices of household members that do not exist in your dataset today, expanding your reach into the entire household without needing to collect or acquire those profiles in advance.

On average, for every match to our identity graph, Match Booster Anonymous can expand household reach to 9 additional devices.

Household expansion is especially useful for companies selling products that are shared between household members, including telecommunications, media & entertainment, and home goods.

Setting up Match Booster Anonymous

Match Booster customers can enable anonymous matching in less than a day with a quick toggle and a few field mappings.

This is a substantial improvement on traditional identity solutions, which can take months to implement across the organization and weeks to create, enrich, and activate new audiences.

To get started, select or create a model that you would like to boost. For example, you can create an audience of anonymous and identified website visitors who added items to their cart but did not complete a purchase. Customer Studio customers can do this using our user-friendly audience builder.

Then enable Match Booster on the model and map the IP address field. You can include additional fields for known profiles as well (like email, phone, and mobile ID).

Finally, create a sync from the boosted model to one or more supported advertising destinations, and enable boosting.

Once the sync has been activated, Hightouch will automatically match your anonymous and known profiles to additional profiles and devices, and sync those new identities into your ad audience, helping you reach and convert more anonymous visitors and households.

Getting Started

Match Booster Anonymous is available for all customers using Match Booster. If you’re interested in cookieless retargeting or household expansion, we’d love to talk! You can book a demo with our solutions engineers to get started.