What is the Amperity CDP?

The customer data platform (CDP) market is confusing — but it doesn’t have to be. This is part 4 in a series of blog posts exploring different types of CDPs, how they differ from other technologies and what you can do to select the right vendor for your enterprise company. Check out part 1 on the Adobe Marketing Cloud CDP, part 2 on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud CDP and part 3 on the Segment CDP.

The Amperity CDP is mostly known for its identity resolution capabilities — something that’s become increasingly important to brands in the face of third-party cookie deprecation.

But does this identity management CDP have the comprehensive feature set enterprise brands require?

Like other identity management CDPs, Amperity was designed to store personally identifiable information (PII) across online and offline channels in a persistent database to resolve multiple representations of the same customer.

However, enterprise brands should understand the limitations of these types of CDPs beyond configurable identity resolution — as well as the best-of-breed technologies that may better suit their needs.

Who is the Amperity CDP for?

Since SQL knowledge is necessary for optimal use, Amperity is aimed at data engineers and analysts, not average business users. Its main purpose is helping technical professionals define, manage and optimize identity resolution logic, as well as stitch customer data to a golden record — or single customer view.

Because master data management (MDM) systems have more sophisticated features for creating a golden record — such as the ability to manually split or merge profiles and deduplicate identities in real time — they’re typically preferred by larger companies with expansive customer bases and a mixture of both online and offline channels.

However, smaller organizations may not have the budget for these best-of-breed tools, which is why Amperity has generally appealed most to medium-sized businesses in need of a less expensive way to solve subsets of identity resolution needs.

How Do You Use the Amperity CDP?

Amperity is primarily used to resolve multiple records for the same customer via deterministic and probabilistic matching. But as a hybrid identity management tool for budget-constrained data teams, it’s not able to accomplish this in real time.

Most enterprise brands use Amperity strictly for its identity resolution features and rely on other tools for customer segmentation, analytics and experience orchestration. For example, Amperity depends on its partnership with Braze to help build customer journeys, albeit only for email and mobile channels as opposed to omnichannel orchestration.

What Are the Pros & Cons of the Amperity CDP?

For brands unable to deploy an MDM, Amperity is a solid short-term solution for obtaining some identity management capabilities at a lower cost. It excels at stitching together profiles to create a 360-degree view of customers.

But with its sole focus on collecting and unifying data to develop a customer 360, Amperity leaves much to be desired for the remainder of enterprise brands’ business use cases.

While Amperity has added prebuilt customer modeling features over the years thanks to the acquisition of Custora — a marketing platform focused on e-commerce — it’s built for technical professionals instead of everyday business users, increasing reliance on data teams.

In order to empower business teams in their day-to-day work, brands will be forced to license additional technologies to uncover customer insights, segment audiences and orchestrate customer journeys. This means data must constantly be shipped between different tools — including new feeds each time an additional use case is desired — preventing business agility and innovation while increasing dependency on IT.

This has the unintended side effect of creating multiple “sources of truth,” undercutting the main value proposition of an identity management CDP and hampering the ability of business teams to thoroughly understand customers or generate advanced insights. Without dedicated support, non-technical users will continue to operate separately, leading to disjointed customer experiences.

And since organizations must invest in multiple ancillary tools — such as customer analytics and journey automation platforms — enterprise brands can expect heavy support costs related to technical resources for the integration, upkeep and optimization of their martech stacks.

The need for additional technologies and data management across different teams and tools contributes to higher costs while significantly slowing down speed to value.

How Does ActionIQ Compare to the Amperity CDP?

Like Amperity, ActionIQ provides brands with identity resolution capabilities that don’t require an MDM. But unlike Amperity, ActionIQ integrates customer identity management (including all customer interaction details in addition to PII) with advanced experience activation and orchestration capabilities — all built for business users, not IT.

Our PersonMatch application enables enterprise brands to deduplicate customer records via machine learning-powered identity resolution. And with a self-service interface that allows users to define new customer attributes on the fly from all available data, brands can build a comprehensive view of all customers.

Additionally, ActionIQ’s proprietary InfiniteCompute data infrastructure — which features unlimited computation power — provides real-time auto-scaling capabilities, allowing for infinite query concurrency to accomplish database updates, segmentation and activation in minutes instead of hours or days.

And since our business-friendly UI is designed to empower non-technical users to access and leverage the data they need without getting caught up in operational bottlenecks, users across marketing, sales, customer service and other departments can quickly and easily personalize customer experiences across all online and offline channels.

By centralizing experience management for both real-time customer experiences and multi-step customer journeys, ActionIQ enables teams to create audiences, test experiences and report on various campaigns from a single location. Our journey orchestration capabilities enable you to design sophisticated, multi-step customer journeys with no limits to the number of steps, channels or decision branches, meaning they can be as complex and flexible as desired.

With less dependence on IT and data teams, brands see marketing efficiency gains of 25% while reducing data analyst workload by 40%. Together with millions of dollars in savings from eliminating the need for additional technologies and services, brands achieve a 522% return on investment.

Stay tuned for part 5 in this blog series, where we’ll explore the Treasure Data CDP.

Learn More

Download our CDP Market Guide to learn more about different types of CDPs or contact one of our experts to see how ActionIQ differs from Amperity and other identity management CDPs.