Data & identity · also called IdentityLink
RampID
RampID is LiveRamp's pseudonymous, people-based identifier, which links a person's or household's online and offline identifiers so advertisers and publishers can match audiences without sharing raw personal data.
LiveRamp is one of the largest identity companies in advertising. RampID is its core identifier: when a brand or publisher sends LiveRamp personal data such as names, emails or postal addresses, LiveRamp resolves it against its identity graph and returns a pseudonymous RampID. Different companies' data can then be matched on RampIDs, rather than on raw personal information.
RampID is used to onboard offline data, like a retailer's CRM list, to digital channels, to activate audiences across platforms, to measure campaigns and to power data clean room collaborations. On the publisher side, LiveRamp's Authenticated Traffic Solution creates encrypted versions of RampID from logged-in users so buyers can recognise them in bid requests.
RampIDs are partner-encoded, meaning each partner sees a different encoded version, which limits how easily data can be combined outside LiveRamp. Like Unified ID 2.0, it is pseudonymous data and subject to privacy law, not anonymous. Its predecessor name, IdentityLink, still appears in older documentation.
Think of it like this
RampID is like a translation service that turns everyone's differently written address books into one common code so they can compare lists without reading each other's pages.
An example
A US home-improvement retailer onboards 20 million loyalty members via RampID and matches them to 60% of a CTV publisher's viewers, then measures how exposed members spend in store.
Related terms
Identity graph
An identity graph is a database that links the many identifiers belonging to the same person or household, such as emails, device IDs, cookies and IP addresses, into one profile.
Unified ID 2.0 (UID2)
Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) is an open-source advertising identifier, originally developed by The Trade Desk, generated from a user's hashed and salted email address or phone number with their consent.
Data clean room
A data clean room is a secure environment where companies combine and analyse their customer data together, getting aggregated insights or audiences without exposing each other's raw personal data.
Deterministic matching
Deterministic matching links identifiers to the same person using definite, shared information, such as the same login email or phone number, rather than statistical inference.
Hashed email
A hashed email is an email address transformed by a one-way cryptographic function, usually SHA-256, into a fixed string used to match users across systems without sharing the plain address.
Sources: GDPR Article 4: definitions