Companies using LiveRamp in these interviews use it as the pipe between their customer data and the places they buy media. Compared with companies of similar size that do not name LiveRamp, they are about eight and a half times as likely to name The Trade Desk, about twice as likely to name a customer data platform or identity tool, and several times as likely to name Adobe's data tools, Tealium, Epsilon, Movable Ink and Amazon Ads. Buyers describe working connections to The Trade Desk and Meta, while others report match rates that vary by destination, additional limitations with Google for some uses, and newer tools taking on parts of the same job.
What tools do LiveRamp companies commonly run together?
In these interviews, companies using LiveRamp frequently pair it with ad platforms such as The Trade Desk, Meta, Amazon Ads and Google; a customer data platform or identity tool such as Adobe Real-Time CDP, Tealium, Amperity or Salesforce Data Cloud; a data warehouse or cloud platform such as Snowflake or AWS; and enterprise messaging such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Epsilon or Movable Ink. Most are large companies. The exact combination varies, and buyers describe both dependable connections and audiences that shrink during identity matching.
More common at LiveRamp companies
About the same
What does LiveRamp do in the stack?
Buyers describe it as the connection between their customer data and the platforms where they buy media. One says “we use LiveRamp to connect to a lot of these platforms to the DSPs”; another calls it “the pipe that essentially pushes out the audiences that we syndicate on our end out to the various buying platforms.” Data typically arrives from the CRM or a customer data platform — one company sends it “from CRM through an SFTP process to the LiveRamp” — and some value LiveRamp's neutrality: “they are like the Switzerland of the world, right? They are the third party.”
Some also use it to measure the other direction, tying ads to sales: “We use LiveRamp to do a data match between The Trade Desk and my offline sales,” one buyer says, and another has LiveRamp “send that feed daily back to Facebook.” See what identity resolution is.
Which ad platforms does LiveRamp connect to?
Buyers describe working connections between LiveRamp and The Trade Desk or Meta — “we go through LiveRamp, and we connect LiveRamp through The Trade Desk,” one says. Some report additional limitations when using Google destinations, particularly for offline-data matching or automated audience updates: one buyer's offline feed covers “everything basically, except for Google, which they don't do, because they model out stuff like Google and YouTube,” and another manually updates Google segments that sync automatically elsewhere. Amazon Ads is about nine times as common at LiveRamp companies; one buyer uses LiveRamp to adjust its Amazon targeting audiences.
Why do LiveRamp audience sizes shrink across platforms?
Buyers describe different identity match rates across advertising destinations: not every customer record can be matched to an addressable user on every platform. As a result, the audience available for activation may be smaller than the original customer list. One buyer says “we do notice that the match rates are different by every platform that we buy in,” while another describes how “there's a drop-off as you're matching the large data set to one vendor to the other.” A consumer goods company characterizes the result as data loss: “the key problem we faced is data loss.” Some buyers tie this partly to the loss of third-party cookies, and some are testing other identifiers — “I think we're exploring UID2 as well to see what the match rates are for retail media.”
How does LiveRamp fit with a customer data platform?
In several buyer accounts, a customer data platform prepares or organizes customer data before LiveRamp connects it to advertising destinations; other companies use LiveRamp for identity enrichment alongside a CDP, rather than only as a downstream activation tool. One multi-brand company cleans its data first — “cleaning up our own first party data and then we'll port that into LiveRamp” — and when it compared Amperity's onboarding with LiveRamp's, found “they're so much newer to the market that they don't have all the connections that LiveRamp does.” Another company kept LiveRamp for enrichment beside Tealium: “Tealium was not in the mix when it came to customer data enrichment. It was all done through LiveRamp.” A B2B distributor on Adobe's platform describes LiveRamp's connections there as “very native, or I would say out of the box integrations.” See what a CDP is.
The LiveRamp stack, layer by layer
How often LiveRamp companies name a tool in each layer, against size-matched companies, which tools they name, and how buyers describe the connection to LiveRamp. How often tools appear together is separate from how well they connect, which is what the last column reports.
| Layer | LiveRamp companies naming one | Tools named | How buyers describe the connection to LiveRamp |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ad platforms | about 1 in 3 explicitly name one in their stack (about 2½× the size-matched rate) | The Trade Desk, Amazon Ads, Google Ads, Meta, Google DV360 | The Trade Desk and Meta described as working; some report limitations with Google for offline-data matching and automated segment updates. |
| Customer data and identity | about half (about 2×) | Adobe Real-Time CDP and Experience Platform, Tealium, Salesforce Data Cloud, Amperity, Segment, mParticle | Often upstream of LiveRamp, cleaning data before activation; one buyer kept LiveRamp for enrichment beside Tealium. |
| Data warehouse and cloud | about 3 in 5 (about 2×) | Snowflake, AWS, Databricks, BigQuery, Azure | Few buyers here describe a direct warehouse link; one is testing cloud clean rooms with LiveRamp. |
| Messaging | about 3 in 4 (about 1½×) | Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Movable Ink, Epsilon, Wunderkind | Some buyers describe sending customer data from CRM or marketing systems to LiveRamp for advertising activation, including through file transfers. The interviews do not establish direct connections for every messaging tool listed. |
| Measurement | over 4 in 5 (about 1½×) | Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics 4, Tableau, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics | Some buyers use LiveRamp for advertising-to-offline-sales matching; the interviews provide limited detail about direct connections to the analytics tools listed. |
| Consent | about 1 in 11 (about 3×) | OneTrust | No buyer here describes the consent tool's connection; one values LiveRamp's own controls for expiring users. |
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Buyers describe several technologies taking on parts of LiveRamp's role, but not all are direct replacements, and most of these buyers still run LiveRamp. One company moved segment delivery to Hightouch for faster updates. Others are evaluating clean rooms, sometimes alongside LiveRamp — one buyer notes that LiveRamp is “really leaning into their clean room capabilities,” and another is “testing Google Cloud Platform (GCP) clean rooms where we are working with LiveRamp.” Some see partner-native identity resolution as a way to reduce dependence on an intermediary: “As the other vendors start developing their own identity resolutions, it seems you can actually bypass the middleman.” And one large company prefers internal infrastructure — “we would just never create a dependency with an external tool like that.”
Switching is the brake. One buyer who evaluated an alternative concluded “the juice wasn't necessarily worth the squeeze to rip out the whole LiveRamp machine,” and cost comes up without driving a move: “It feels sometimes like we overpay for it a little bit.” See what buyers pay for identity resolution.
The stories behind the stack
The counter-current: when the pipe just works
Many buyers describe LiveRamp as the dependable part of the stack. “Their integrations are generally easy. They have good coverage in the US,” one says, and another says it has never heard of anything breaking in its integrations. Buyers' complaints here center on match rates and cost.
What this means for your stack
LiveRamp companies in these interviews use it to carry customer data from a CRM, customer data platform or warehouse to the ad platforms, and many run it beside Adobe or Salesforce data tools and The Trade Desk. Buyers describe the connections to The Trade Desk and Meta as working, some limitations with Google for specific uses, and variation in match rates and addressable audience size as recurring concerns. Our recommendation, not a practice buyers describe: measure match rates per destination on your own data rather than relying on an average; check how each destination handles adds and removals before building lifecycle segments; and before replacing LiveRamp with a clean room, reverse-ETL tool or a partner's own identity, list every destination that would have to be reconnected.
What this page does not show
It shows which tools LiveRamp companies run, not which ones they should. How often tools appear together says nothing about satisfaction, and a tool appearing beside LiveRamp does not mean the two are connected. LiveRamp companies are compared with companies of similar size, but they still differ in industry and in how much they spend on paid media, so part of the difference is the kind of company rather than the choice of LiveRamp. And match rates depend on each company's data and each destination, so one buyer's loss may not match another's.
Common questions
What tools do companies use alongside LiveRamp?
In Alium's verified buyer interviews, companies using LiveRamp frequently pair it with The Trade Desk and other ad platforms, a customer data platform or identity tool such as Adobe Real-Time CDP, Tealium or Amperity, a data warehouse such as Snowflake, and enterprise messaging such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud. About one in five name The Trade Desk, about eight and a half times the rate at companies of similar size.
What does LiveRamp do in a marketing stack?
Buyers describe it as the connection between their customer data and the places they buy media: taking CRM or customer data platform audiences, resolving them to a common identifier and sending them to ad platforms. Some also use it to match ad exposure to offline sales for measurement.
How does LiveRamp connect to The Trade Desk, Meta and Google?
Buyers describe working connections to The Trade Desk and Meta, including matching offline sales. Some report additional limitations with Google for specific uses: one buyer's offline feed excludes Google, and another updates Google segments by hand because they do not update automatically the way other platforms do.
Why do LiveRamp match rates vary?
Buyers report that match rates differ by platform, so the addressable audience at a destination can be smaller than the original list, and some link this to the loss of third-party cookies. Several are testing other identifiers or partners' own matching. Match rates depend on each company's data and destination.
Which tools can replace parts of LiveRamp's functionality?
In these interviews, buyers mention tools that take on parts of LiveRamp's role rather than all of it: reverse-ETL tools such as Hightouch, clean rooms, other identifiers such as UID2, data providers' own identity resolution and building in-house. Most still run LiveRamp, citing the effort of reconnecting every destination; one company has moved its segment pushes to Hightouch.
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