Drawbridge Adds Offline Purchases To Its Cross-Device Marketing Data

Drawbridge‘s platform is getting smarter thanks to partnerships with Datalogix and Axciom-owned Liveramp.

The company, backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, already works to identify the multiple devices that are (probably) used by the same person, which in turn can be used to improve ad targeting and attribution.

In other words, with Drawbridge technology, your activity on your desktop or laptop computer could influence the ads you see on your smartphone, and the company can help advertisers figure out when a mobile ad pushed you to make a purchase on desktop.

With these partnerships, Drawbridge is connecting that cross-device data with offline purchases as well — so now it’s looking whether those mobile and desktop ads might have pushed you to actually buy something at a brick-and-mortar store.

Connecting online ads to offline purchases isn’t a new new, but Drawbridge founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan said that by plugging this partner data into her company’s cross-device graph, Drawbridge can give marketers “a full-circle view of the customer.”

While Drawbridge is expanding, it’s also facing increased competition, both from startups and from the big online ad platforms.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Sivaramakrishnan said. “The understanding around probabilistic technology [that’s the technology that Drawbridge uses to make its cross-device matches] is also evolving right now, but eventually we’ll see the dust settle and the true leaders will really emerge.”

She added that her team is no longer purely focused on advertising. There are other companies, including those in the finance and travel industries, that “want to understand the consumer journey across devices,” and Drawbridge has built products to serve them, too.