Why Strong Data Foundations Still Fall Short in Activation
Marketers have solved a lot of hard data problems over the past few years—from unifying customer profiles to building clean, real-time pipelines. But one challenge still quietly eats into paid performance: the audiences brands build don’t always match the audiences they can actually reach.
That disconnect isn’t just a technical issue—it translates directly into wasted media spend and lost efficiency. When portions of your best audiences go unmatched, campaigns don’t perform as efficiently as they could: fewer impressions reach real customers, and performance budgets don’t work as hard as they should.
That’s why we built Match Boost, a new Rokt mParticle capability that enriches first-party audiences at the point of activation to improve match precision and paid reach across platforms like Meta and Google Ads. Early adopters are already seeing meaningful improvements in match rates and campaign efficiency.
Match Boost reflects a shift in focus for marketing teams, from relying on accurate data to actually realizing its full value in activation. Because every audience, every identifier, and every impression counts.
Why Match Rates Lag Behind
Audience match rates fall short for reasons that have nothing to do with effort or intent, including:
- Fragmented identifiers: Users sign up with different identifiers across devices and channels, such as personal vs. work emails, new phone numbers, or app logins that don’t sync back to CDP data.
- Platform inconsistencies: Each ad platform handles identifiers a little differently—from required fields to hashing standards—so even clean first-party data can get mismatched or dropped in transit.
- Privacy-driven signal loss: And with privacy changes limiting cross-platform tracking, like reduced reliance on web pixels and the phaseout of third-party cookies, teams can no longer depend on shared identifiers to close the gaps.
Even for brands with advanced data maturity—organizations with unified customer profiles, clean pipelines, and strong identity resolution—incomplete match rates and underperforming reach can still limit campaign potential.
The Hard Way: Manual Enrichment
Some organizations try to close this gap themselves either by sourcing enrichment data, building custom pipelines, or contracting directly with third-party vendors. It can work, but it’s a heavy, resource-intensive lift, with uncertain payoff.
Teams end up pulling in engineering to manage APIs, data ops to handle permissions and consent, and legal to negotiate vendor agreements—all before they can even test whether better match rates are possible.
By the time everything’s live, weeks (or months) have passed, and any “real-time” advantage is gone. That kind of overhead defeats the purpose of fast, data-driven activation.
The Better Way: Match Boost
Manual enrichment takes time, resources, and ongoing maintenance. Match Boost eliminates that complexity entirely.
Built natively into mParticle, it matches first-party audiences in flight, at the point of activation. It uses data from trusted third-party sources to fill in missing identifiers—such as additional emails, phone numbers, or device IDs—as well as user attributes for select platforms before those audiences are delivered to destinations like Meta, Google Ads, and Google Marketing Platform.
Audiences match more completely. Campaigns reach further. Budgets work harder. All of this happens without new tools, integrations, or manual steps.
The process is privacy-safe and transparent. Data stays within the controlled activation path, and enrichment is applied only for that event—it isn’t stored in customer profiles.
Tangible Benefits and Business Impact
With Match Boost, teams see measurable improvements in both performance and efficiency—often within their first campaign cycle—including:
- Higher match rates: 30–100%+ increases in recognized users and reachable audiences across major ad platforms.
- More efficient media spend: Improved audience alignment reduces wasted impressions and increases effective reach.
- Faster activation: Eliminates manual data enrichment and vendor setup, streamlining campaign launches.
- Privacy and compliance by design: Enrichment runs securely within mParticle’s controlled activation flow.
Match Boost is especially valuable for performance marketers, growth leads, and activation teams managing large, cross-channel campaigns who need to improve reach and efficiency without expanding tech or headcount.
Getting Started
Match Boost is available today in the U.S. for Real-Time and Composable Audiences, with support for Hybrid Audiences early next year. It currently supports activation across Meta, Google Ads, and Google Marketing Platform, with more destinations on the way.
Enabling Match Boost is as simple as clicking a single button that’s already built directly into your existing audience workflows. Turn it on within mParticle to enrich audiences automatically at the point of activation. There’s no new setup, no additional integrations, and no engineering required.
Activation takes minutes, not months, and performance improvements can appear as early as your next campaign cycle.
The Bigger Picture
Match Boost is part of mParticle’s broader mission to help brands build more performant audiences that turn better data into better results.
Instead of reshaping how marketers work, we reimagined how they can make every impression, every dollar, and every audience perform to its potential. We’re continuing to launch new features that empower marketers to improve audience performance and push the limits of what’s possible in activation and results-driven innovation.
Get in touch with a Rokt mParticle expert to learn more, or read our docs.
