FAQs

Frequently asked questions about Optable's products and capabilities.

What does Optable do?

Optable creates advertising software that enables organizations with first-party data - primarily publishers and retailers - to accelerate the growth of their businesses, through a suite of capabilities that include identity resolution, audience segmentation & activation, and collaboration.

For Identity, Optable enables customers to build their own identity graphs using a combination of 1st- and 3rd-party data assets, thus creating a consistent, deduplicated view of persons and households across the entire organization.

Publishers and media owners can also take advantage of Optable's Edge APIs, by calling identifiers from their graphs in real time to enrich ad requests, leading to increased yield and lift in open-market programmatic buying. Edge APIs are available as both client-side and server-side applications.

For Audiences, Optable provides customers a powerful interface for building audiences, using all the available data at their disposal. Audiences can be created using both user attributes ("traits") as well as well as events, enabling customers to hand tailor their audiences to suit a wide variety of use cases, including retargeting, prospecting, demographic targeting, purchase propensities, and more. Once created, any audience can be seamlessly activated to a number of popular supported advertiser and social destinations, such as The Trade Desk, DV360, Google Campaign Manager, Yahoo DSP, TikTok, Meta, Braze, and many more.

In addition to activating audiences for monetization, customers can also gain rich insights about the composition and behaviors of their audiences, through Optable's Insights reports.

For Collaboration, Optable enables companies to securely match their first-party data with their partners.

Organizations such as publishers or advertisers each have to access private data collaboration nodes in Optable’s secure cloud, and are able to connect, configure, and execute clean room applications that match private datasets in a purpose-limited, controlled, and privacy-preserving manner. (A simplified explainer of one of Optable's secure match protocols can be found here.)

What is first-party data?

First-party data is the information that companies collect from their own sources. Information gathered directly about one's customers, from both online and offline sources, such as a publisher website, apps, CRM systems, or surveys, are all forms of first-party data.

Companies have an obligation to their customers to protect their first-party data. At the same time, companies can use their first-party data to improve their understanding of customers, deliver better user experiences, and achieve a greater return on marketing and advertising investments.

Who should use Optable?

The Optable software is designed to give online advertising ecosystem participants, such as publishers, advertisers, and agencies and their partners the ability to directly and securely exchange information pertaining to their private first party data.

• Publishers with media walled gardens use a DCN to enable advertiser partners to match their audiences to their private identity graphs

• Advertisers and agencies with first party audiences use a DCN to match their audiences with partner publishers

Matched audiences can then be activated for targeting, modelling, insights or analytics purposes.

Does Optable have its own alternative ID?

No. As a data processor, Optable does not offer its own bespoke ID (ie, an "Optable ID").

Rather, Optable's identity resolution product is designed to facilitate the coalescing and merging of exogenous identifiers, across platforms and systems, as a means of organizing a customer's data assets into a consistent structure that is geared toward marketer and publisher use cases. Optable alone is not a replacement for 3rd-party cookies.

That said, we can recommend some providers with whom we have trusted relationships, who provide cross-site identity resolution capabilities.

Is Optable a controller or a processor of personal data?

As stated above, Optable is a software and services provider, and in that context is a processor of personal data. The Optable Products and Services Privacy Policy explains how we process information for our customers as a service provider, because we want individuals whose information we process on behalf of our customers to understand what we do.

It is important to note, however, that with respect to the personal information that we process on behalf of our customers, our customers are the controllers. The handling of that personal information is governed by the privacy policies and statements of our customers, and by our contracts with them.

In the special context of operating our public website, developing our products, and providing our services, Optable acts as a controller of some personal information that it directly collects via its websites, email, and other means. You can find the details in Optable's Website Privacy Policy.

What is an Optable DCN?

An Optable Data Collaboration Node (or "DCN") is a secure data collaboration node which is accessed and used by a single customer to store a private identity graph and user trait data used for collaborating with the customer's trusted advertising partners.

The level of connectivity and information transfer is controlled and configured by each customer within their private DCN. Partnering is completely voluntary and configurable.

Optable.co provides DCN hosting as a managed service running in Optable's secure cloud environment.