Identity Resolution and Identity Data: The Privacy-First Alternative to Cookies
January 22, 2025
Why Identity Resolution Matters in a Cookieless World
You don’t need to rely on walled gardens or third-party cookies to launch effective, personalized campaigns. Instead, you can put identity resolution to work.
So why depend on walled gardens and third-party cookies when you can leverage identity data?
Identity resolution is the answer to modern targeting challenges. It supports compliance with privacy laws such as the CCPA while enabling hyper-personalized campaigns built on your own first-party data. As a result, marketers gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of their customers.
If you want to unlock highly personalized campaigns, identity data is the key.
What Is Identity Resolution and Identity Data?
Identity resolution is the process of connecting everything you know about a customer across multiple touchpoints into a single, unified identity profile.
These touchpoints can span channels such as websites, email, and social media, as well as devices like smartphones, laptops, and connected TVs. When this information is tied to a single user, it becomes identity data. This includes identifiers such as name, email address, phone number, and other signals.
Online identity data can also be appended to offline information, including physical mailing addresses, creating a more complete customer view.
How Identity Resolution Stays Privacy-Compliant
At first glance, identity data may seem like a large collection of personally identifiable information. That raises an important question: how does identity resolution remain compliant with privacy laws and ethical data practices?
The answer lies in encryption and anonymization. All sensitive data used in identity resolution is anonymized and encrypted. This ensures personal information is protected, never exposed, and never used in non-compliant ways.
Today, identity resolution is one of the most privacy-compliant solutions available to advertisers. It removes the need for third-party cookies and reduces reliance on walled gardens.
Why Rely on Identity Data?
Identity resolution platforms do the heavy lifting by connecting customer identifiers across devices and channels into a single profile.
This process is scalable, accurate, and privacy-first. When marketers work with an identity resolution partner, they gain a complete view of customer behavior across channels.
Beyond moving away from third-party cookies and closed ecosystems like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, identity data delivers several additional benefits.
Key Benefits of Identity Resolution
Maximize First-Party Data
Identity resolution uses the first-party data you already collect. Through data enhancement, that information is enriched using additional sources and processes. The result is a robust customer profile built on data customers have willingly shared.
Unify Online and Offline Customer Identities
Identity platforms connect online behaviors with offline attributes. Everything is tied to an anonymized identifier, giving marketers a clearer picture of who their customers are and how they behave.
Recognize Customers Across Channels
With unified identities, marketers can recognize customers across channels and devices. This leads to more consistent messaging and stronger engagement based on real behavior.
Launch Hyper-Personalized Campaigns
Personalization is no longer optional. In 2025, customers expect relevant, personalized experiences. As AI capabilities grow, automated hyper-personalization is quickly becoming the standard for successful campaigns.
How Identity Data Is Collected and Cleaned Responsibly
Identity resolution is built on accurate, verified first-party data. During data onboarding, information is securely transferred to the identity resolution platform and processed through data enhancement workflows.
This includes cleaning the data by removing duplicates, outdated records, and inaccurate identifiers. Common examples include unused email addresses, typos, or overlapping profiles, which are merged and updated.
Next, the data is encrypted and anonymized to ensure privacy compliance and protection against breaches. Additional external data is then used to enrich profiles, such as identifying household relationships or secondary email usage.
How Identity Resolution Builds Accurate Customer Profiles
Accurate customer profiles are maintained through continuous, real-time updates within the identity resolution platform.
Each customer is assigned a unique, anonymized identifier that is consistently refreshed as new signals appear. First-party data and additional identity signals are connected, cleaned, anonymized, and enhanced. These elements fit together to create a single, reliable customer view.
The result is a strong foundation for hyper-personalized marketing across channels.
How to Target the Right Audience Segments
Once identity profiles are organized, marketers can segment audiences based on attributes such as age, interests, behaviors, or past purchases.
Effective targeting depends on understanding your audience and optimizing campaigns in real time. Identity resolution platforms make this possible by responding to customer signals across channels as they occur.
Identity data also supports lookalike modeling. By analyzing existing customer traits and behaviors, marketers can identify new prospects who share similar characteristics. This makes audience expansion more efficient and accurate.
About Stirista’s Identity Resolution Solution
OMNA, Stirista’s identity resolution platform, is the industry’s first real-time identity graph.
It is built from a modular stack of component graphs, including ABM, viewership, IP, and device data. Unlike other identity graph providers, these components are not locked together. Marketers can access individual graphs without purchasing the entire identity graph.
Drive growth with Stirista as your identity graph provider
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