Our fifth session of the LiveRamp for Developers webinar series was on Tuesday, August 3, and focused on our Activation API. LiveRamp’s Mihir Parikh, Senior Product Manager for Activation; Mike Gillett, Tech Lead for B2C Activations; and Matthew Moran, Senior Global Product Marketing Manager, provided an overview of Activation and the Activation API.
LiveRamp offers a suite of different products and services, and activation is one of our core offerings. Activation takes customers’ first-party online and offline data and onboards it to our platform. Through our ID graph, we find matches in the broader marketing advertising ecosystem to help our customers effectively target and optimize campaigns to reach their desired audience.
LiveRamp has a broad ecosystem of destination partners—different programmatic digital marketing and ad players that we integrate with. After onboarding this data, our customers are able to run their campaigns through different marketing platforms.
The Activation API
Activation API is one of our foundational APIs, enabling programmatic activation from your own marketing and campaign management applications. The new version of the Activation API was released in October 2020 in open beta. This API allows you to view, configure, and manage any of the 400+ destinations LiveRamp works with, including Facebook, Google, The Trade Desk, and others; distribute your segments to multiple destinations; and allows resellers the ability to manage their customers. One of the key enhancements of this API is the ability to view segment delivery status, which has been a major request from many of our clients.
At a high level, the Activation API enables distribution of directly identifiable data (DID) and device-based segment data to different marketing platforms through any of our applications. Through the API, users are able perform destination management, which instructs our system where to send your data and segment the targets you want to distribute to different destinations. Destination management enables you to manage the destinations and the distribution of the segments through the API.
This allows you to leverage LiveRamp’s ID graph and distribute to our partners or the 400+ different adtech and marketing tech platforms, streamline the process of segment distribution, obtain delivery statuses, and eliminate time and resources to more efficiently build and maintain different integrations to third-party destination partners.
Activation API use cases
What does the Activation API enable our customers and developer partners to actually do?
The first big use case is the ability to view available LiveRamp destinations. In order to decide which destinations you want to distribute data to, you need to know what those destinations are. In many scenarios, you may want to programmatically create that information from our platform through the API. The API could give you a list of all the destinations we support and you can bring that list into your own third-party application and display it however you prefer.
The second is configuration and management of destinations. Each destination has unique configuration parameters you would need to send. It could be your specific ad account ID, your authentication, or anything that tells the destination that this data belongs to this particular customer. You can manage all of those configuration elements through the API.
The third is managing segment distributions. Once your data is in the LiveRamp platform in a format we call segments, by utilizing the API you can instruct the platform to distribute the segments to different downstream destinations.
Segment information is another use case that allows you to query different segment IDs and get information in the LiveRamp platform, allowing you to decide which segments you want to distribute to end destinations.
The last use case is segment delivery status. This is one of the biggest feature requests we receive. It allows viewing and querying of the different delivery statuses, so you are able to understand if your segment was delivered to the end platform. If not, you’re able to obtain the status or understand where the failures may have occurred. Through the API, LiveRamp can provide you with the different statuses, from in-progress, queued, or failed.
Activation API endpoints overview
For those familiar with our Connect platform, once you’re logged in, you are able to choose destination accounts and the different integrations that are tied to a specific destination. For example, Facebook is a destination, but Facebook has different types of integrations depending on the location or type of data, and LiveRamp supports these different integration types.
Through the Activation API you can obtain the integration information that can help you decide, in your own application, which particular destination and integration you are interested in configuring for your marketing campaign.
As mentioned earlier, each destination will have very unique settings that you may need to configure within your application, and also which identifier types you want to enable for that specific destination. This is where configuring and managing destinations comes into play.
Through the API, you are able to query the settings and set them in order to programmatically set up different properties without leaving your application, and without having to log into the Connect interface.
If you are familiar with our user interface in Connect, there is a section where you can select different segments to add them to a distribution. Through the API, this can be accomplished with the managing segment distributions endpoint. You can query segment information and add those segments to a distribution under a particular destination account. The segment ID endpoint allows you to query different segment IDs, so you can create the segment ID then add them to distributions.
The last is the segment delivery status endpoint. This is an important feature that will give you delivery job status and shows you what’s happening for each particular segment. Sometimes the segment delivery is broken into multiple batches in our system—we call them delivering jobs—and you can get the level of detail you need to allow you to see what’s happening. If there are failures, you can either take action on your side or reach out to LiveRamp for help without logging into our system to get the delivery status.
Case studies and Activation API demo
Matthew gave an overview of some real-world examples and case studies, including a large national retailer, a platform reseller, and an ad agency, and Mike gave a live demo of the Activation API in action and ran through each of the endpoints described above.
Next steps
If you’re interested in learning more about using the Activation API, or if you have questions about anything in this recap, check out the session on demand by registering. In addition, if you’d like to take a deeper dive, please reach out to us via the contact form to get in touch with experts who can lead you through the solutions we have to offer.
The next session in the series will be given by the Data Marketplace Product and Engineering team, discussing the Buyer API, on Tuesday, August 10, at 12:00 pm PT.
I encourage you to explore Buyer API via the developer portal prior to next week so you can familiarize yourself with what we’ll be talking about and come prepared with questions you may have.