CDP vs. DMP - Which is Right for You?

If you’re in digital marketing, you’ve probably heard of CDP and DMP. But what are they exactly? And which one is right for you? They’ll explain the difference between CDP and DMP here.

What are CDPs?

CDPs are a marketing tool that helps you understand your audience. By understanding who your target audience is, what they want and how they interact with you, you can make more informed decisions about how to reach them. For example, a CDP combines customer information with data on competitors, products, and services to give marketers a complete picture of their customer’s needs and preferences.

What are DMPs?

DMPs are used to collect data about your customers. They are also used to target ads and offers to customers, create customer profiles, create customer segments and conduct predictive analytics.

A DMP is a database that stores information about consumers for them to be targeted with specific marketing messages. In addition, the database has segmented the audience based on their interests, behaviors, or demographics so they can be marketed accordingly.

Adobe Real-Time CDP experts state, “ A DMP can recognize what aspects of your customers can be shared with other segments.”

What’s the Difference Between CDP and DMP?

A CDP is a database of customer information. It gathers the data you need to identify and target your customers, including their names, addresses, browsing habits, and purchase history.

By contrast, DMPs are used to gather data about your customers’ online habits so that you can target them with ads. For example, a DMP combines all this data into a single place where it can be accessed by members of your organization who have been granted access rights.

The big difference between CDPs and DMPS is that CDPs are simpler, while DMPS involve more complexity in both setup and maintenance (but they also have more features).

CDP vs. DMP: Data Types, Targets, and Their Storage

When it comes to first, second, and third-party data, both platforms handle them well, the first party data comes direct from the customer, CRM, and the marketing automation database as well, while the second-party data, is the one that is provided by the other companies, like their partners, resellers, and others, and the third-party data is the one from multiple and varied sources.

The interesting part is, both CDPs and DMPs collect the same types of data regardless of their sources, what differs are their targets, they both aim differently. DMPs aim at the third-party data more, like the cookies and other segmented customer IDs, once occupied, they store that data for a limited time. While CDPs on the other hand focus on the structured, semistructured, and other unstructured PII data that is from the first party only.

Unlike DMPs, a CDP will store its collected data for a longer period of time, with this longer duration, marketers will be able to build in-depth, accurate, and transparent customer profiles that will help them nurture customer relationships. Plus, a CDP is able to share as well as draw the required data with any system.

CDP vs. DMP: User Profiles, Data Selection, and Capturing the Data

The user profiles are created for the DMPs segmented ones and the categorized people, these are tied to the lifespan of the cookie to get their anonymous behavioral data.

Coming to the data collection, the data collection part involves numerous field values that let them collect their mandatory data. Still, since it’s a part of the field data, DMPs can collect the required insights, that cover the websites that are visited by people, the time duration they spend there, and the sort of information they are reading on it. However, you will be needing the analytical tools to extravasate more patterns and to get the most out of every DMP.

Now the data selection part is something that involves various fields, this lets them value the collected data that is quite necessary at the moment. However, still, being a part of the field, the DMPs can collect data that is quite important in the field and gather some insights about it too.

One of the best parts about CDPs is that they tend to neglect any sort of anonymous data and aim at the specific data that comes from individual customers. You can take an email address as an example of the type of customers the CDP will identify.

What is the Role of CDPs and DMPs in Your Strategic Marketing?

Well, then it all sums up to this one question, what are their roles in your marketing strategies? How will they help you and your organization in its marketing? Let’s find out.

It is quite certain that each data management platform can play a significant role in a company’s marketing. When you access their old/historical data you will get to know that both platforms can easily illuminate and give you an insight into your digital marketing strategy, but the ways of describing both of them will be totally different.

Let’s understand it with an example, DMPs are quite effective for digital channels and audience segmentations, while CDPs, on the other hand, provide some advantages when it comes to social media websites, offline interactions with potential clients, and some insights into their customer’s needs and their purchasing behavior align with the recent interaction with their brand as well.

How Can You Tell If You Need a CDP, DMP, or Both?

You’re in a business that needs to know more about your customers. You have a CDP and want to expand it but don’t know where to start. Or maybe you’re using it for the first time and want to ensure your company’s data is being used as effectively as possible.

In either case, this article will help you figure out if it’s worth adding or expanding your CDP and which direction best fits your needs:

If you want targeted ads based on the actions of individual people (such as what they do on their app or website), then DMPs are right for you! They can also help with retargeting campaigns by showing ads regularly so users keep coming back even though they’ve already made their purchase decision.
If you need better insight into who exactly is making purchases through each channel (like Facebook), then a CDP is right for you! This way, every customer interaction can be tracked so they can be properly analyzed later when looking at trends across multiple channels’ performance over time.

Apart from these, there are ascertain aspects to look for when picking a data platform:

Comprehend the difference between each platform.
Get an insight into how each of them can help you with your marketing strategies.
Be aware of how you want to use your data.
See if you have enough resources to dedicate them to your plan.

DMPs are great for those who want more control over the data that their business collects and uses. If you have a lot of flexibility in terms of your marketing strategy, or if you need to customize it based on audience size or location, then a DMP might be the best option for you.